Shoney and her parents had moved down from New York, so of course that alone was enough to really hurt them when the attacks occurred. They were fortunate only in that they had moved away in time. Chavonne and her parents were not so lucky. About two weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Chavonne moved in with Shoney for good. Her parents had been killed in the attacks.
The first time I saw her after this occurred, she looked horribly similar to the women in the picture below. I’ll never be able to forget the tears gushing down her cheeks and the dark shadows in her eyes. She lost all of her spark. She became “that girl who never talks” and “the really weird one” because people didn’t understand what she was going through. No, I didn’t personally experience any losses during this great tragedy, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not able to understand what it was like. I saw firsthand the effect that it could have; my best friend’s cousin all but threw her life away because these so-called terrorists had taken the lives of her parents and she could no longer bear the will to keep on living.
I’ve never lost anyone extremely close to me, thankfully, so I won’t lie and say that I know exactly how Chavonne felt, but I’ve seen death before. I know what it can do to people, and the attacks on 9/11 weren’t just something that impacted a few individual people. It impacted our entire nation as a whole. I say this not to downplay everything that Chavonne experienced but rather to offer further insight into how this must have affected everyone. People all over the country were going through exactly the same thing. Men lost wives, women lost husbands, children lost parents, and parents lost children. Like the rest of the nation, I view these events as a horrible tragedy, but despite everything, maybe a small bit of good did come out of it all.
People who never took one look at others before suddenly saw the world in a whole new light. Rather than letting our mourning for the dead take over and dictate our lives, we rose up as a nation to come together and work with each other to create a stronger and more united country.
--Morgan Bernstein
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Original Post:
Looking at this image helps me to remember the tragedy of 9/11 and the loss of so many lives in such a small span of time for some reason that no one knew of then. Even though I do not know these women or what they went through or the losses that they experienced on this day, I can imagine. I can imagine that these women crying in could have lost a son or daughter or sister or brother. These women possibly lost friends and peers.
This picture really hits home to me the reality of this terrorist act. At the time of the attack I was in 5th grade English class with my teacher Mrs. Church. She went over to the television after getting a telephone call through the school phone and let us watch, as the towers burned and crumpled to the ground. Being only 10 years old, excited about my upcoming birthday, I was confused and thought that we were watching some kind of educational program that they would explain later. It wasn’t until they said that school was getting out that I realized that something was wrong. But, I couldn’t quite consume and comprehend the reality of this devastating tragedy. These women, in this picture, experienced 9/11 in its true realistic form. Grasping the American flag to her bosom, she weeps for the souls that so unexpectedly met their end and had no clue as to why. She weeps for strangers, family, friends, or loved ones whom she will never be able to see their smiling face or hear their lovable laugh. She will not be able to share stories with them or hear about their clumsy newborn baby taking their first steps. She will not be able to give them a proper burial because no one can find their bodies. She weeps because she knows that some of them plummeted from the windows of the World Trade Center calling their loved ones to say goodbye before they took the final plunge to death. She weeps for the lives that ended so suddenly and without warning and the ones that she never knew. She weeps for their pain and for their families’ pain. She weeps for their souls and lives that should have lasted a full lifetime. The souls of this event didn’t deserve to die. But, their lives have been departed from this Earth because of men who were willing to die for a cause that they believed with their entire being and who bathed in the illusion that they were doing the greater good in the name of their deity. The faces of these women show their traumatic loss and how this loss will be an unbearable wound that will never fully heal. I can only imagine the turmoil felt on this day for the people who were frightened, panicked, shocked, and confused by what happened on this most memorable day in the twenty-first century of America.
The emotions brought on by this event are emotions that cannot be changed for Americans. The citizens represented here are few of many who underestimated the malicious drive that humans can have to annihilate figures so symbolic to numerous cultures in this world. Women, men, and children all experienced this horrific tragedy and this photograph expresses the anguish that many felt on this day. The feelings that were felt after this day did not pass and go away like a bad dream, but stayed in place and created something that the terrorist of this attack hadn’t expected...a thirst for revenge.
-Kathy Cook
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