Remembering 9-11 While Moving Forward.

10 years ago on September 11th, 2001, before it became 9-11, the day started out like any other first-of-the-year day for me, as the air was starting to become cooler in the mornings, and I was running a bit late.  Amy was home with baby Stephen, and I spent some time with her, as she was slumbering, as the result of being more than 6 months pregnant with the baby that was to become Annie. Time was sweet in the mornings before school in our little blue house.
I remember looking for a parking spot, listening to the radio, a few minutes late, when I heard that a plane had crashed into one of the WTC towers. Thinking surely it was an accident of some type, I hurried into my classroom and turned on the ancient TV that in one corner, and as things began to unravel, I realized that this was no accident, with the second plane hitting. Hurrying out into the hall to find someone to talk to about it, as I had first period off that year, I heard a lot of quiet and then the steady sounds of TVs on all over the building. A coach had rolled a TV out that was normally used for showing workout videos, and all around, you could start to hear the buzz. As I recall, there was an announcement and then a flurry of e-mails to keep things calm and on schedule, and that we attempted to do, as another plane crashed, and then another in the countryside in Pennsylvania. Amidst all this, Amy called me in a panicked voice, as the electricity had flashed off in Grandview. (Terrible coincidence, it turned out, as a transformer had quit.)
We went through our day on schedule, suspending real classwork in most cases, but following the bells, eating lunch, telling kids to get out of the halls, following routine. The day's specific moments after that first shock have largely faded from memory, as they have been replaced by other days, with tragedy or joy or mundane routine. Things returned to normal in the weeks after that in the school setting, while the world changed profoundly, and this made me wonder if that is what we should be doing: providing a calm in the storm, a steady and consistent wave of movement forward, a safe haven.  Should that moment have been more of about provocative learning? About connecting our lives to those who were going through horror in NYC, in DC, and on a lonely field outside Philadelphia?
Then, this past week, Jamie, who is my second grader, came home with an assignment to be a part of a mural that would honor the day and the victims, as she was to draw or get off the Internet pictures representing her thoughts on things. Now, as a 2nd grader, it hit me that she had no real clue about what happened then, and I was okay with that, but she wanted to do her best to help out, and we found pictures that showed one tower being hit by a plane, and then another picture with obviously wounded and suffering people helping each other through the ash and destruction. She wrote the word HEROES under that one.  As she got ready to get out of the car the next morning, with her poster contribution, she held it up, and she told me that there was an "evil man" and he planned things to hurt us. I reassured her that while this was so, that she was safe, and she hugged me and went into the building a little more serious than normal.
Yesterday morning, I was checking texts, as I was getting ready to head out the door, and there were two from another counselor and my boss about the very sudden, horrible death of one of students, a sweet-faced girl from what I could recall, (and I didn't have her as one of my students, but felt gut punched for this girl and her family and friends), from a unknown cause. We went into crisis mode, offering services to the dozens of students who came into our office or were in classrooms, and other counselors came to help, who had a connection to her, through her church or through a neighborhood connection.  We set a room aside, and we offered them some comfort or consolation, I hope, as there were tears and vulnerable stares of grief. During the time when announcements are made, there had been plans to have our "moment of silence" for 9-11 remembrance, but on this day, the decision was made to announce this sad loss, as we moved 9-11 to Monday. Tears flowed, and there was an air of somber weariness throughout the day.
And, I realized that we did what we had done on 9-11: we had continued living while carrying the grief with us, tucking it gently but firmly away, as it could not deter us from moving forward to what was ahead.