By Stacy Torres
Every year September 11th fills me with peculiar grief. I lost my younger sisters that day. They lived, but after fleeing destruction, they never really returned. And that day never really ended.
I’ve spent twenty-five years trying to understand the unraveling of our relationship.
Let me explain.
Six days before the attacks, the twins began tenth grade at the High School for Public Leadership, one of two closest schools to the World Trade Center. I had high hopes for their new school, transferring them there for its educational, career, and internship opportunities and partnership with Syracuse University. Since my mother’s death five years before, when I was sixteen and the twins were ten-years-old, I’d inherited outsized responsibilities for running the household and taking care of my three younger sisters, including making major decisions about their education.
Due to their school’s proximity to the World Trade Center, a ten-minute subway ride from our home, I considered it an especially safe and convenient location. But on the morning of September 11, 2001, that proximity turned into a nightmare of epic proportions.
Only this year I realized how alone I was during this unfolding horror. The first plane hit the North Tower. I called their school. Ring, ring, ring. No answer. The subways shut down before I could catch the last E train downtown. I hunkered down alone in the apartment, listening to ABC news anchor Peter Jennings strain to make sense about what was happening outside my bedroom window, invoking “massive casualties” a stone’s throw from my sisters’ school.
After the first building fell, Jennings said, “It’s hard to put into words, and perhaps one doesn’t need to. Both Trade Towers, where thousands of people work, on this day, Tuesday, have now been attacked and destroyed with thousands of people either in them or in the immediate area adjacent to them.” Was it possible my sisters could live through this? I darted to my bedroom window, transfixed by the black smoke plume downtown and something I never thought I’d see, just one tower standing. That sight somehow felt more terrifying and surreal than when both buildings disappeared from view. Where were my sisters? Were they already buried under wreckage?
I waited, waited, and waited some more. I thought my sisters were dead. After losing our mother to colorectal cancer five years prior, my scope of tragic possibility had expanded exponentially. Terrible things happened, not just to other people—to us—and anything was possible. Two of my college professors called, concerned for me and my sisters. Orlando hadn’t heard from his son Gregory, who worked on the 103rd floor of the North Tower, but checked on me. Jeanne suggested I stock up on water and other essentials, which turned out to be the perfect task for managing the chaos, confusion, and grim uncertainty that shrouded me during the longest morning of my life.
I strolled the aisles of multiple local supermarkets, grasping for some semblance of “normal,” and loaded my cart with gallons of water and dried pasta. Nothing like hearing Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy” to soothe you in the midst of disaster. Once home, I made lemon pudding. And waited.
My sisters returned in the late afternoon, after 5pm, covered in dust and armed with dispatches of dodging fiery debris. They got separated from their class while running for their lives towards Battery Park, a short walk away on a clear day, and missed getting evacuated by boat. A tourist helped them break into a fancy restaurant and scavenged fine tablecloths to cover their faces as the giant dust cloud from the collapsed towers engulfed Lower Manhattan. He took a picture of them, which I lost forever to a long-defunct email account. Perhaps subconsciously I never wanted to see it again, since I tend to archive useless minutiae like old bills and receipts from 1999. I vaguely remember them smiling in the photo. Even with the world ending, they tapped into their muscle memory and social conditioning to “Say cheese.” Or perhaps they were simply happy to be alive.
They somehow had the foresight to pick up charred papers on the ground that blew from the disaster site. I don’t have one of my sister’s phone numbers, but I have these tatters in a shoe box in the closet of my Chelsea apartment. With no background in finance, I barely understand them. But I shudder at the slips emblazoned with Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. and Marsh, Inc., two companies that lost hundreds of employees that day.
In the days and weeks after, my sisters insisted they were “fine.” I wanted to believe them. They soon dropped out of high school, unleashing chaos. But the rift in our relationship seemed to run deeper, kicking off years of not speaking. Today we have no contact. Sometimes I think I understand why our relationship imploded, after years of relentless and often unproductive dissection.
The academic in me can point to the accumulated trauma of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), like our mother’s early death, our father’s unpredictable and at times a violent temper that contributed to my in-patient psychiatric hospitalization and made it safer for him to move out of our apartment in March 2001. People outside of our family also preyed upon my sisters’ vulnerability, which isn’t my story to tell, further weakening bonds that were much more fragile than I realized.
Other times, I admit my cluelessness and mostly accept that I’ll never know why our relationship came undone. I’ve stopped torturing myself with “what-ifs”: What if my mother had never died? What if I hadn’t transferred them into that school? How would things be different?
Until recently, it never occurred to me to walk from the World Trade Center footprint to my sisters’ school. I counted approximately 315 steps from the southeast corner from the South Tower’s footprint to the school’s entrance at 90 Trinity Place. That short stroll threw into sharp relief the painful absurdity of my 21-year-old optimism—and frankly, ego—that had me believing that with enough effort, I could fix things. No chance.
Twenty-five years later, I’m finally practicing self-compassion and forgiving myself for things outside of my control, accepting that this endless day is forever part of me, and for better or worse, has made me.