September 15, 2002

Welcome to Wyndspirit Dreams! In his song, Alan Jackson asks, "Where were you when the world stopped turning?" For me it was not September 11, 2001, it was April 19, 1996. "We lost Dallas." To this day my mom’s words are burned into my soul. My only brother had drowned. My first reaction was denial. Things like that just didn’t happen in our perfect family. But it did, and, just like that, the secure little world I had known all my life was forever changed. 

I lived through it all. The denial. The grief. The anger. The guilt. The sense of loss, the void in my life that will always be there. Yes, my world—life as I had always known it—ended the day my brother died. But, you know what? It started over again. It’s a different life now. I’m a different person. I am older, a little more world-weary, a little sadder. But I am also stronger, bolder, more confident. I had my life torn to shreds, and I survived. Life is always changing, and most of us will have our worlds end and begin anew more than once before we die.

The other day the editor of an e-mail newsletter that I subscribe to commented that 9/11 really hit home to him when he realized his baby daughter "will never know a world before September 11." Well, I never knew a world before Viet Nam. I grew up with Viet Nam and its aftermath. It was just part of my life. I had never known a Viet Nam vet, but I cried when I listened to the dedication of the Viet Nam memorial even though I didn’t truly appreciate it till years later when I had close friends who had been in ‘Nam. I’ve heard numerous references to us Americans losing our innocence because of September 11. I say, get real! Anybody who truly thought the United States was so impregnable that it would never be attacked deserved to lose their innocence. It was never a matter of "if," but "when." And "when" finally happened. The world ended. And a new world began.

Maybe we needed to be shaken out of our complacency before something even worse happened. I don’t know. Whatever the reason, a new world has begun turning, and this is what our life is now. The Twin Towers will be only a legend to our children, and September 11 will be just one more event in history that helped shape the world into whatever it’s like when they are growing up. It won’t be a different world to them—it will be the only world they know. And, chances are, the world will end at least once for each of them, too. 

The world stops turning. A new world starts turning. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. That’s life.