Last year, for the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, I posted a video entitled Crystal Morning. The video consisted of footage shot on the morning of the attacks and the day after. The audio track was taken from emergency response calls and radio dispatch transmissions.

Yesterday, I received this e-mail from a woman who watched the video shortly after it was released. I thought it was a fitting memorial for today:

Last year, shortly before the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I was looking for online video to show my then nine-year-old daughter, who has little memory of the event and had been asking me some questions about it. Within the first minute of the film, something made me stop and reverse the video. There, standing behind a guy with a bike and to one side of a guy in a green uniform was the familiar figure of another witness to the events of that day, my husband, Larry.

Larry had spent the 10th in a training seminar on the 17th floor of one of the towers - he was an internet architect in charge of the Technology Lab for AIG on John Street at that time - and was supposed to be there that morning to meet up with co-workers and attend an exposition at Windows on the World. Having just been diagnosed with diabetes a few weeks before, he and some of his co-workers decided to get bagels for breakfast before going upstairs. Doing that probably saved their lives. He was standing in the street when the first plane hit, still standing there, trying to get his boss on the phone for instructions when the second plane hit. That is roughly the point he appears in the video in his blue shirt, with cellphone to his ear, like everyone else that day, unable to get a connection as he watched the buildings burning a few blocks away.

Our daughters have heard him talk about all the things that happened to him that day, but seeing this video finally made it real to them. Later that day, his life was saved again when workers in a condo office in Battery Park City pulled him and his secretary off the street as the first tower fell and they were running for their lives - he had fallen while trying to climb a fence, and been pulled to his feet by another stranger seconds before the collapse, and she was running barefoot, having lost her shoes as they went over the fence.

He and I both knew people that were not as fortunate that day, and it remains important to us to have our children understand the magnitude of what happened, not as an abstract bit of history, but as something that forever altered all our lives. I just wanted to thank you for being a part of that.

Sincerely,
[Name Withheld]

Thank you for taking the time to write and for letting me share this story with the rest of the world.

Here is my experience from that day.