There’s something about those frozen-in-time events that we share. The ones where we all immediately recall where we were when they happened; when we heard. They somehow encapsulate a moment into this immutable snapshot that we carry and share and reflect upon when other milestone moments occur.

Ten years later, life is very different for me and the concrete contrast of the content of that day and this one causes me to reflect on more than the shared experience of Nine Eleven.

So, I remember.

I remember that I was driving from my home to my therapist’s home office on a sunny Tuesday morning. I was listening to the radio and the host was making some crack about how bad a pilot has to be to crash into a 110 story building. Todd Ethridge cut in to say something like, “Dude. That’s not funny. We don’t joke about stuff like that.” I love Todd — he’s a good guy who, at the time, was fronting a band called the Throwbacks. We’d go see them perform 80s covers whenever they played. It was one of the few things the wasband and I continued doing together as our marriage fell apart.

And that’s how the memories go. It’s never linear. Each moment pulls a thread of narrative that leads you to memories you’ve left boxed up for a decade.

I continued driving and learned that it wasn’t a small plane — as originally thought — but a commercial jet. Such a tragic accident. How awful for those families…

And then there was the second one.

I arrived at pj’s and a man was waiting outside — oblivious to the most recent information. I blurted, “They’re bombing us with our own planes!” We exchanged a few sentences about what was happening before he rushed to his car to turn on the radio.

pj had been in sessions all morning and didn’t know what was happening outside, on this gorgeous September morning. How do you break that sanctuary — in this dark, quiet office where you come for respite and healing and to look at the hard parts of your existence? I somehow did.

And so it went.

I emerged from that space to the horror that two more planes were down. And then there were the reactions and the overreactions, if you can overreact when planes with real people are being crashed into buildings with real people. The rumors about gas lines being shut down, more planes, poisoned water supplies, and on and on spread. I ignored them. Some members of my larger family talked about stocking up and going to our mountain retreat. I ignored them, too. I was scheduled to speak at a conference in Nashville and decided to take my family with me.

Decisions. Lots of worry. Lots of wondering. Lots of news, until I picked Berns up from preschool. I did not want him to know or see or hear this horror. Gillian was only 6 months old. She wouldn’t remember this day, and I somehow hoped it wouldn’t become a part of her childhood that colored things in heathers.

If I had an album from that week it would have images of  the corner of Kingston Pike and Smith Road where I was when Todd shared the news, pj’s dark office, the smoldering field in Pennsylvania, the napping preschoolers, the gashed side of the Pentagon, the Volvo station wagon that became our refuge, the TVs everywhere with those planes hitting the towers and those towers falling again, my tiny children sequestered in a room, the conventioning news editors scrambling to get out of Nashville and back to their posts, the banquet hall filled with service coordinators who chose to listen to me when they were feeling the pull of the news, the people jumping from those buildings, the full Maxwell House hotel, newsprint flags, the drive from Knoxville to Nashville and back, the firefighters and the priests and the police officers and the smoke, the empty Opryland Hotel, the depressed rescue dogs who were trained to find life in that rubble, the first airplane overhead after days of silence.

The insult and miracle in grief is that in spite of cataclysmic loss, we carry on. We count the days and recount the events, but we carry on. We promise to change and honor and unite, yet we carry on. The moment becomes encapsulated and part of our memory forever, and we carry on. It’s been a day. It’s been a week. It’s been a month. It’s been a year. It’s been a decade. It’s been a lifetime. It’s been a millennium.

We mark the time. We carry on.