The 9/11 Rear View Mirror

For the rest of our lives, 9/11 will be a day of remembrance. And it should be. How can I forget the surreal experience of turning on the television in the break room at work that Tuesday morning? Jill had just called because she had heard on the car radio that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. As I was talking to her, the second plane hit the South Tower. 142 minutes later, my colleagues and I were frozen, bewildered and sickened, as we watched the Twin Towers collapse under the fire of hate.

9/11/01 was a horrible day.

I left work early and Jill and I picked up our kids from school. In the rear view mirror there sat my 2.5 year old daughter, Mary Brooks, who was attending the “Two-day 2’s” class at Trinity School in Atlanta. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, our daughter got to go to school, just like her big brother, Connor, who was a second grader. OMG, the Two-day 2’s class was so sweet, and it was so innocent, and there she was, in the back seat, sweet and innocent and joyful, in the midst of the news of death and destruction.

I didn’t have any idea what was going to happen after that day. I couldn’t look in the mirror and say, “Hey, don’t worry about this, everything is going to be OK.” because I honestly didn’t know if everything was going to be OK. Who were these hijackers who had so little regard for the lives of innocent people? How could God let this happen? And how in the hell were we going to protect those innocent kids sitting in the back seat?

Let’s now fast forward to September 11, 2023. What has happened to that sweet, innocent kid sitting in the back seat, the one who I looked at in the rear-view mirror?

Having successfully met the rigorous requirements for graduation from the Two-day 2’s class at Trinity School, Mary Brooks matriculated to the School of Social Work at Columbia University, where she received a Master of Social Work. It is amazing that a two-year-old could comprehend the intricacies of neuroscience, psychology, and counseling, but obviously, Mary Brooks was, and is, very advanced.

Sure, there were a couple of hurdles that she had to jump between Trinity School and a master’s program at Columbia University; things like high school and college, and adolescence and teenagerdom, but it is almost like none of that happened. She has gone straight from the back seat of our car on 9/11/01 to her new job, a new career and a new phase of life on 9/11/23. The fact that she will be in New York, about 25 blocks from the site of the Twin Towers, is not lost on me. She is no longer in the back seat, helping us interpret her modern art and talking about her new buddies in her Two-Day 2’s class.

No, she will be in New York, working for a psychotherapy group, interpreting the modern problems that folks experience in this life, in 2023.

I realize now that there was no way that I could protect her from everything that was scary or harmful or dangerous in 2001, and there is no way I can protect her from all those things now.

But isn’t it amazing, how 22 years after that scary, awful, tragic day, that day when I couldn’t bring myself to tell myself that it was going to be okay, that there is this wise, talented, perceptive two-year-old plus twenty-two years, who will be counseling those in need on 9/11 in New York?

And now, finally, 22 years later, I realize…

It is going to be okay.