At five a.m. on the morning of September 11, I was feeling a little sorry for myself. After a long, lovely summer of working at home and caring for our infant daughter, I was finally returning to the studio and to my regular schedule. That morning, I reluctantly left the house after stroking the baby's cheek and tucking her in. Sniffling and sighing, I drove in to the office, trying not to picture Olivia waking up bereft, feeling abandoned by me, her working mother. This seemed a woefully heavy burden to bear in those pre-dawn hours. Telling myself that I'd see the baby at lunchtime, and that at least she was with her daddy, I settled in to work. The morning flew by. There is a television monitor in our studio, which we mostly ignore. That morning, in the midst of talking with a caller, a co-worker appeared in the hallway holding up a piece of paper on which he'd written in huge letters, "Turn on CNN!!!" We did, and stared in shock and disbelief at a gaping rent in the aluminum skin of one of the World Trade Towers. A plane hit the World Trade Center? A terrible accident, we thought, maybe a small plane, an inexperienced pilot? I interrupted our caller, told the audience what had happened. As we watched, another plane streaked across the screen and slammed into the second World Trade Tower. We knew then that we were witnessing a calamity unlike any other, one unfolding on live television, in a sickening blossom of orange flame and gray smoke against a sky too deeply blue to be real. But of course, it was. When word came that yet another plane had smashed into the Pentagon, I felt dizzy and queasy and could only think, I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home. At that moment, home, like my earlier sorrow over leaving my baby, seemed like another country, fondly remembered but far away. Tragedy requires mere seconds to forever alter our lives and in its wake, we can't help but remember our former selves as lucky innocents, only half awake to the horrors of the world.

It was a day of unimaginable destruction unfolding on live TV. The image of the jet striking the tower, replayed over and over, had all of the dreamy logic of a nightmare. There is the azure sky, there the dully gleaming face of the building, and there -- see? in a plume of flame the jet disappears, swallowed up in the vastness of the skyscraper. Then, the building's collapse, the roiling black cloud of smoke and debris, the people, so tiny on television, fleeing that noxious dark cloud. I watched it happen again and again, and each time it seemed more real, and more terrifying. There was nothing to do but watch, no way to make sense of it, and no way to escape it. Every hour and with each fresh revelation, the horror grew and grew: the cell phone calls from doomed passengers on the hijacked airliners; the crash of Flight 93 in a field outside of Pittsburgh; the death of the chaplain of the New York Fire Department as he administered last rites; the images of ruin and fire and loss... Any one of these stories would have been tragic alone; their combined weight was all but unbearable. Perhaps the worst, if one dares try to categorize hell, were the images of people leaping to their deaths from the inferno of the World Trade Towers. One pair jumped hand in hand. I think of those two individuals, and how Tuesday, September 11th, probably seemed a day like any other to them. Did they have any inkling of their fate that morning, as they hurriedly gulped a bowl of cereal before racing out their respective doors? Were they distracted as they kissed spouses and children goodbye, by thoughts of tasks needing completion, meetings to be attended, and the dry cleaning to be fetched? Once at the office, high above Manhattan, were they engrossed in a report, an e-mail, a memo? Then, suddenly, incomprehensible darkness, noise, smoke, searing heat. Unable to breathe, panicked, desperate, in a state of terror beyond imagining, clinging together -- was there time even for words? How did these two ordinary people, to whom nothing so very extraordinary was ever supposed to happen, find themselves crouched on the brink of history? And how did they find the courage to clasp hands and choose their fate? Watch their fall, hand in hand through the spectacular blue of a New York morning. Feel the coolness of the air as their bodies slice through space, the ground racing up to meet them. It must have been like a dream of falling, because I believe and hope that in moments of such unspeakable fear, our minds somehow protect us from the worst of the truth. Falling, falling, falling, they plummet toward earth, these two ordinary people who were like any one of us, with our same cares and complaints and simple joys and delights. Falling, on a Tuesday, a day in which nothing remarkable or bad was supposed to happen. Falling, out of their ordinary lives and into the outstretched hands of God, but falling, and gone.

That evening, eyes and throats aching with the bitter salt of unshed tears, we finally turned off the television. The sudden quiet wasn't peaceful; it was the heavy, stagnant quiet that settles over a house after a funeral. We bundled the baby into her stroller and set out for a walk. It was one of those late summer evenings when it seems all of the world is bursting with ripeness. The grass was almost too green, and a few late-blooming crape myrtles foamed with pink blossoms, their cast-off petals littering the sidewalk. We slowly made our way to a nearby strip shopping center, one usually crowded with people at all hours of the day. The parking lot was two-thirds empty, the stores quiet. We walked into Ben & Jerry's. Sitting outside, eating ice cream for dinner, I looked around. There was a teenage couple at an adjacent table, the boy obviously nervous, the girl listening raptly as he chattered about his new car. Behind us, a man sat alone with a book. A woman dragged her young son by the hand into a Chinese restaurant. The scene, ordinary in every respect, was a powerful reminder that, even in the face of enormous loss and grief, life goes on. It may be the most terrible and beautiful truth about human beings: the unendurable can, in fact, be endured. And even with our hearts in ruins, life continues. It won't be the life we knew before September 11, 2001, but it will be life, sweet and powerful, and full of unknowable mysteries.