Dear Friends,

One almost feels guilty here at home having dinner in Tribeca, just a few blocks from Ground Zero, when there are scores of emergency workers digging through the rubble to uncover what's left of the missing. My emotions are frozen, like the zone below Canal Street can't seem to encompass the enormity of what we experienced with our own eyes.

I saw the biggest building in New York — one of the largest in the world — disintegrate in a matter of minutes with lots of people in it. It hardly made a sound from where we stood, except some people screaming around us. Most of us didn't really know what was going on. We had never seen anything like it before. What is left is years of healing and rebuilding and who knows what else. It makes me tired just to think of it. I want to cry and I can't, I almost don't feel anything. But a sense of horror pervades my thoughts. I had just awakened Tuesday morning, hearing many sirens in the street. I said to myself, Oh my, the last time I heard those sirens was in 1993 when they bombed the World Trade Center. I thought no, it couldn't, no it couldn't have happened again. Maybe it's a big fire, I thought, or something else big and bad.

Then my son called me from his phone on the street as he was on his way to work; he said "Ma, a plane just crashed into the Trade Center!" I said "Was it an accident or on purpose?" and he said "I don't know." Within minutes we were outside with hundreds of running people, and someone said another plane had hit and it was a terrorist attack. They seemed certain. Within an hour, the two towers were dust.

I don't know what we should do now. I want to cry and I can't, I don't know why. I am sick in my stomach and perhaps traumatized. I have felt like just hiding under the covers and never coming out, and I know that is not an ! answer. One wants to help but it is unclear what to do. Many people are volunteering, so many that it is difficult to figure out how and where to help.

War is an activity I had hoped the world had outgrown, but there is truly no reason to have thought that, as the Gulf War was a real war and we even watched it on TV (as well as all the other wars we have witnessed second hand in other parts of the world). This one is more up-close and personal, so to speak, and why wouldn't it be so? After all, what makes us think we are exempt?

My husband and sons are watching Band of Brothers on TV right now, and it is the last thing in the world I would want to watch.

I hope all of you will be able to weather the coming times and be safe. I hope for this for all of us, and for the world. Maybe if everyone prays for world peace, something good will happen. I can't think of what else to say. The community spirit in New York has been awesome. It is one good thing that has come from this so far.

There is always something good in the human soul. The enemy is lack of reason.

All our love,
JL
September 16, 2001