Fourteen Years Later

 I have always loved the slightly irreverent but almost always dead on poetry of Story People, but their tribute to the response of Americans as a people to the attacks on September 11th, 2001 in particular speaks to me.

It was an incredibly difficult day in our household.  My youngest son had been on chemotherapy for the previous year and was in the hospital getting his last dose when the World Trade Center towers were hit by airplanes.  He was in one hospital bed getting Cytoxan and watching Mulan while my husband and I were lying in the other hospital bed in his room watching CNN and trying to figure out exactly what was happening.

I like this because I think that we as a family tried to stand together throughout a very difficult year.  We relied early and often on the kindness of family, friends and strangers alike.  We tried to juggle making the year as normal as possible for both our cancer kid and his siblings with making sure he got the treatment that he needed, which entailed daily medication, weekly trips to the hospital, multiple injections at home, sixteen admissions for treatment, and a lot of hand washing to make sure he had the least number of admissions for infection as possible.  Not exactly a cake walk, and while we were far from perfect, I think that we came out at the end stronger than we were at the start.

I feel like we as a country have lost that feeling, and I would dearly love to see some of it return.