It is a day I will never forget much like when the Spaceship Challenger exploded, and the Oklahoma City bombing occured…it was a year after returning home to Toronto after graduating from college in Upstate NY. My aunt was visiting from NYC and had arrived only a few days earlier. I was living in the basement of my mother’s home at the time and normally I wake up in the late morning turn on CNN before getting ready to run errands. Well, this time I got up close to 10 AM turned on CNN and saw the carnage. I immediately ran upstairs and told both my mom and aunt who instantly ran to nearest tv set to watch what happened. I remembered the fear we had for my uncle (their brother) because he worked at the hospital that was closest to ground zero – St. Vincent’s and my 2 cousins (one of whom had just got married only 4 months earlier). It took almost a week to finally reach my cousins and my uncle. They all had narrowly escaped serious harm. One of my cousins worked for an IT company that was located in midtown about a block from the WTC. He had the option of going to work that day and decided at the last minute not to. When the towers collapsed it crushed one side of the office. Thankfully no one was there because they had evacuated the area once the second plane slammed into the second tower. My uncle was stuck in the subway during that time and when he was able to surface and go to the hospital he said the silence was the scariest thing he had ever “heard”. He said there were very few bodies arriving from the site. A lot of walk-ins but pretty much no bodies. He said it was very surreal, almost as bad as the eerie silence on the streets. Knowing that my family was safe was a relief but knowing that so many were not will always haunt me, for lack of a better term. I will never forget it…