9/11 5th Anniversary

So, the 5th anniversary of 9/11 was yesterday.
I remember where I was when I heard about the attacks. Since I was living in Houston at the time, I was an hour behind those on the East coast, but I had just arrived at work already. I had listened to my tape player on the way in, no news (I can't stand chatty morning radio shows). I was at my desk and there were a few of us working. All of a sudden I get this call from one of my co-workers. He asked if I had seen the TV. No. He said someone just attacked in New York City. I said very funny. He wasn't kidding. I tell someone else in the office. We turned on the TV in the conference room, though we had some maneuvering to get it on a network station. We tuned in just after the second one hit. We just stood there, still, shocked, awed, frozen. My boss came in shortly after that. He, too, was shocked. We managed to work a little that day, but a little piece of everyone wasn't there in that office. Those pieces were with the tragedy we had just witnessed and the aftermath. Each of us would take turns looking at the TV for updates, watching as they revealed that the Pentagon had been hit and that they didn't know if there were other flights that might be attacking. The nervous reactions as we saw how many fights were still reported as not landed after flights had been grounded, wondering if one of those flights was next, only to find one more crash which we wondered at first if they were related. A couple of people knew people who worked around the WTC area. I knew a colleague from grad school who was working there the last I had talked with him. For weeks I looked to see if his name was on the missing/confirmed dead list. One of my co-workers' brother worked in a nearby building and took some pictures. Almost every station was broadcasting 24/7 on the tragedies of that day. This was not the same twisted fascination that we Americans tend to have of tragedies - this was fear, concern, worry and uncertainty that was compelling us to watch constantly.

I was so busy yesterday that I didn't even have a chance to watch the TV. I briefly listened to CNN on the way into work, and I got a little sad listening to the 9/11 stuff, but because I was so late, I couldn't dwell on it.
Jon was watching some of the programs this weekend and when he was watching something on the controllers, I thought to myself: imagine what it felt like to those that were on the ground in line to take off from an airport when the planes struck and then being turned around, brought back into the airport and finding out what happened. Would there be annoyance, fear or relief? What did the pilots communicate to the customers and what was communicated to the pilots themselves when they were told to turn back to the airports? How surreal was that experience to those people?
Every year I think of a group of different people that was affected - one year I thought of the people who weren't there at the towers or the Pentagon for one reason or another (although they were supposed to be) and what kind of thoughts were running through their heads when they saw what happened - many felt guilty, others felt blessed; another it was imagining what those in NYC were feeling while dealing with the crisis and afterwards. I've been to NYC many times before but only twice after, and the only difference I noticed were that there were quite a few more police in and around the subway and Grand Central Terminals than before.
Jon thinks about the fact that less than 2 months before the attack, he was on top of one of the WTC towers (with his friends 2 days before we were married) and that what if the terrorists had picked THAT day to carry out their attacks instead of September 11?
There are so many "what ifs" when a tragic event like this takes place, so many unanswered questions. You could drive yourself nuts thinking about them. I think that I was trying to get my wedding to be in September/October timeframe, but my parents wanted it in the summer. If I had had it in late September, it would have been nuts to try to get some of the relatives to go to the Northeast after those events. The list could go on, especially with those closer to Ground Zero. My parents had been in NYC when the first WTC attack happened in 1993. But they were fortunately nowhere near the city on September 11. But they knew people who were there - one of my dad's closest friends lost his brother that day there.
The question still is out there: Why? Not why did it happen. Why did some people live and why did others die?