After a summer spent hoping for rain and reluctantly following Fox TV's "American Idol", I feel hot and stupid and unprepared for the first anniversary of September 11. Can it really be just one year ago that we gathered in disbelief in front of our television screens as the horrifying attack on the World Trade Center unfolded in real time? Seen now, those images -- the jet piercing the tower, the blossoming fireball, the collapse into dust and smoke of the buildings themselves -- have lost none of their power to devastate and sicken. If anything, the enormity of the act has only been magnified by the passage of time. Shock has begun to give way to a horrified acceptance that such things really can happen here, to us. We've known sorrow, paranoia, and wild economic instability. It's been a year of fear, doubt and grave concern about our future. It's been a year of change for all of us.

It's a small thing, but after September 11, I had no patience for "Entertainment Tonight." Who cared about some movie star's diet secrets, or how a minor actress decorated her Beverly Hills mansion? My attention span for trivia was shot. Even fiction was ruined for me. Instead of the novels I once loved, I gobbled reams of newsprint and stared at the talking heads on MSNBC for hours. Restless and agitated, I wandered from task to task, berating myself for even caring how my knick-knacks were arranged given how many other women were now widows, how many children were now orphaned by the terrorist attacks. Things that had once seemed critically important in my life, like my morning radio program, felt silly and insignificant. And how could I argue with my husband over whether or not he remembered my telling him that we had plans for next Friday night when I was lucky that he was even alive and thus able to annoy me? In the months following September 11, I resolved to live each day in gratitude, with a full awareness of my many blessings. I'd love to report that I've done just that. But that's a hard path for a regular, flawed person to walk, and some days it feels as though I spend more time picking myself up after a stumble than I do making any real progress. Maybe that's been true for all of us this year.

While the scale of the September 11 tragedy takes our breath away, the truth is, grief is grief. For each of us the loss represents something different. For the families and individuals directly involved, it's personal, a hole ripped in their very hearts that may close but won't ever really heal. For others, it's a loss of security, that uneasily restful feeling of knowing that the worst horrors are outside another's door and not your own. For some, September 11 is an assault on the future, on the hopes and dreams we pin on our children as we push them into the unknown days and years that lie ahead. Whether keenly felt or not, the losses on September 11 are all of ours. That grief isn't a commodity to be sold, or worn, or waved on a banner: it's a gaping wound that won't be knitted over by anything but time.

Seven years ago, on the day we buried my beloved grandmother, the sky was the bluest I'd ever seen. Driving home from her grave, I looked around and was sick to see that the world was going about its business as though nothing remarkable had just occurred. How could that man be jogging? How could those girls stand laughing in front of a drug store? How could anyone dare sit in their car and sing along to the radio? How could our grief, which hung on us like an unbearably thick and heavy blanket, weigh less than a whisper to the rest of the world? It was a lesson in loss and reality.

Even as we endure the most terrible sadness, we go on with the daily tasks of living and eventually, the act of living itself crowds sorrow from our hearts. Is that where we are today? Moving forward the only way we know how? I hope so, and pray so. Because the alternative, that we're now too complacent and dulled by junk food and junk entertainment to comprehend how tenuous and shaky our comfortable lives really are, is as scary as anything any terrorist could conceive.