Finding Meaning in September 11

Honoring the Lost Writers of 9-11-01

by Elizabeth Lyon

Getting home has never felt so good. My daughter and I had left Eugene, Oregon, on September 4, for New York. As unashamed, frenzied, tourists, our week was everything we'd hoped for. I felt particularly pleased that I had been able to hand-deliver a big book project to my agent.

When our Tuesday the 11th flight departed from La Guardia at 8:20am, we craned our necks to peer out the tiny airplane portal for one last longing glance at a city that lives the American dream. Everyone belongs in New York City--the tall, short, and lumpy-bumpy; the old, decrepit, mentally ill, and disabled; the rich, poor, famous, and unsung; foreigners, strangers, people of every ethnicity, race, and religion. The city epitomizes secular success. It is the confluence of commerce and culture. Admittedly, this is New York City’s finer self, but these shining qualities are exactly what the twisted terrorist thugs hate about it, and about the United States.

Shortly into our flight, our United pilot broke my reverie. "Due to National security, all aircraft have been ordered to land immediately." My daughter and I stared at each other, not comprehending. National security? All aircraft? Our plane? Passengers grabbed air phones to learn the horrible news: one tower, the second tower, Pennsylvania, the Pentagon, a rumor of more hijacked planes still on their way to destinations unknown. As our flight was diverted to Chicago’s O’Hare, shock deepened into grief then fear. We landed on a tarmac eerily devoid of human life and entered a terminal that had been evacuated because O'Hare was considered a possible target.

Lucky to find a hotel, we joined other displaced passengers, all of us riveted to the television images. After three days of waiting and hearing reports of yet more days before we could fly home, I made a decision. I found a one-way rental car, and my daughter and I began our 2200-mile return to Eugene.

I felt as if we were being pulled and propelled from Wisconsin to Minnesota to North Dakota, from North Dakota to Montana to Wyoming, from Wyoming to Idaho to Oregon, by an endless umbilical of the American flags we saw along that route. Somewhere in the unbroken miles of the grassy plains, a realization turned my grief more personal. On September 11, in Pennsylvania, in New York, and in Washington D.C., writers died. Among the thousands of dead, how many were writers? How many hoped to be novelists? Hoped to write a family history, a memoir, a letter asking forgiveness?. How many of the victims dreamed of getting published, of quitting a day job, of becoming best-selling authors? How many doubted their abilities and let doubt and distraction stop them from trying?

Six hundred? Three hundred? How many? I felt the loss anew, not only for lives cut short but of dreams cut short. And I felt helpless.

I have lived my life ascribing meaning to the events that touch me. While The Day That Changed Everything is guaranteed to offer up its meaning from now until the end of my life, I seem at best able to grasp small bits of this tragedy's meaning. As we crossed the state line into the "Big Sky" country of Montana, I asked myself this: What if I vow never again to say, "I can’t." What if I never again claim, "I'm too busy." I thought of the personal stories that had already reached the newspapers. I thought of the faces of the dead. What if I adopted one of the recently silenced writers, one writer who was cruelly robbed of a chance to finish a novel, start a love letter, or dream a poem?

I realized how important it is for all writers to continue writing with renewed courage and boldness. It may be a small, perhaps insignificant gesture, but I can write in honor of a writer who has no tomorrow. I can write as if I have no tomorrow.

Elizabeth Lyon, an independent book editor, is the author of Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write and The Sell-Your-Novel Toolkit. She can be contacted at elyon@ordata.com or at www.elizabethlyon.com.