I always think of a former colleague around 9/11, but not for tragic reasons. This year, though, I also keep thinking about an aunt who died a century ago.
When all hell broke loose in 2001, my not-yet colleague was barely 7 — just as I had been when JFK was assassinated in 1963. That’s old enough to understand that something is wrong, especially if your parents are crying, but too young to appreciate their pain, too innocent to understand the depth of the country’s gut punch.
I was up early enough on 9/11 to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center. I knew I’d have to rush into the office because that’s what journalists do on horrific days, but I was torn about whether to wake Cathy up. I let her sleep, just writing a note to warn her about the horrors on television. Much as I could have used a hug, I wanted her to have a last hour or two in a more innocent world.
If we had a 7-year-old, I hope I would have stayed home, journalism be damned. I couldn’t have stopped the gut punch, but I could have hugged them over and over and hoped they’d learn that love is how we cope with the unimaginable, how we lift one another even as we’re gasping for air.
Americans get only a couple of collective gut punches in a lifetime — partly because we’re lucky, partly because we’re numb, partly because so few horrors are unimaginable anymore. Life hits us with jab after jab after jab, and sometimes we forget the toll they take.
If the Uvalde massacre happened in the 1950s, it would have been a gut punch. Now we treat it like a jab — and a training opportunity for 7-year-olds.
That brings me to Aunt Dolly, the 10th of 12 children, three years younger than Mom, all of them gone. She was born September 8, 1919, and died the same day.
1919 caught my eye because it was smack in the middle of a flu pandemic that left 675,000 Americans dead — a pandemic most of us hadn’t even heard of until COVID came along. As COVID’s death toll creeps toward 1.1 million in the U.S., we’ve started treating it like just another shooting. Wonderful.
Twice as many Americans died from COVID as in world wars I and II combined. COVID killed way more people in one day than terrorists did on 9/11 — some of them the bravest and the finest.
Aunt Dolly wasn’t a flu statistic, but I’m sure her death was a gut punch to my grandparents, aunts and uncles. And although my loved ones have lost hardly anyone to COVID, life has given us other gut punches, from my young ex-colleague losing a father to others missing friends and grandparents and even children.
What COVID did was wrap the gut punches in jabs’ clothing. When you see friends every two months or colleagues mostly on Zoom, it’s easy to underestimate their pain, or pretend yours is normal when it’s really unbearable.
So keep your eyes open. Maybe you’ll notice an unusually terse email or a friend walking with a shuffle or a colleague staring blankly into space. You might even look in the mirror one day and see a frightened 7-year-old, desperate for a hug.
Murphy Slaw
Something old: I’m a movie buff and I’d never seen this. Worth a look.
Something new: We all can use a good cuddle.
Something borrowed: The evidence is pretty incriminating. And cute.
Something blue: This is a gambit I will definitely decline, thank you.