The Day We Forgot to Live
Lyndsey Tarsia

“How much is yogurt again?" I asked my manager, Cindy.

“Ninety cents," she replied immediately. As I mindlessly count back this nice man's change, a thousand things run through my mind - my car repair that is going to break the bank. I still haven't figured out my BDIC classes for my major yet, I can't forget to go to that Honor Society Meeting after work...

"There you go sir, have a good one."

"Well that's going to be a little difficult today, don't you think?"

"I don't know what you mean sir, did something happen?"

"You haven't heard?" He sounds incredulous as I shake my head. “None of you know what happened?" Cindy and a few others hesitantly leave their stations wondering what this man is raising his voice for. “A few airline planes were hijacked! They flew one straight into the World Trade Center tower, and supposedly there's one headed toward Washington."

'No!"

“Yes! It's on the news right now."

No...

Empty grilles sizzle, registers lay silent as a television is being dug out of a storage room somewhere and turned on to the images of our fallen infamy. Suddenly pumpkin spice coffee and breakfast sandwiches aren't a priority as groggy students file into the small room with the dusty television to see if the rumors are true. They are.

“Can you even believe this?” a voice said. I couldn't. I stood there watching the images of fire and mayhem, and people covered in ash running away from the inevitable. Stilettos and Skechers, they all looked the same. Every person was gray. Race, age, occupation, it all vanished in the race for their lives. The phrase "rat race" now held a whole new significance.

The camera focused on a middle-aged woman waiting on the street. The reporter approached the woman and asked why she wasn't joining the others in the rush to safety.

"My husband works in the Tower! I heard he'd be coming down this street, please God let him be okay ... please Rick, please come. please come…"

The woman's eyes searched everywhere, trying desperately to distinguish one gray mass from the next, her left hand pulling through her frosted hair, her right hand clenched and wrapped around her waist, almost hugging herself. It looked like she was simply trying to comfort herself in the most painful moments of her life. I watched as this woman frantically looked closely at every passing face, and my breath stopped for her, my heart raced for her. It was difficult to watch, waiting for her eyes to light up in recognition of her husband. I focused on her hand, saw how hard it was clenched. A tight sweaty fist rebelling against the possibility of being abandoned on the busiest streets of our nation.

“Rick! Rick, oh my God, you're alive ..." The rest of the words I'll never know. They were lost in the dirty shoulder of her husband. His arms wrapped around her, held her close – he had come. His arms enveloped her, but her hand was still clenched, and I'm not sure if she'll ever really let go again. The man just kept saying he was okay...he was okay.

As I stared at this scene I thought of how many people would never experience that reunion. So many would be left standing alone on that street, searching through the nameless gray. That half-hug of clenched self-comfort would just have to do, because their husbands were not coming. He was not okay. I'll never forget that woman's fist; her thumb was tucked inside, her French manicure clawing into her skin, the very image of desperation and fear. I'll never forget what absolute relief sounds like; muffled in the shoulder of a loved one who had been found.

"Go home, Lindsey, we all are." Work was cancelled.

I stepped outside into a perfect September day; the sunshine mocked the emptiness and despair of that day. I took a deep breath, pushing to the back of my mind the thought that so many had taken their last earlier that morning and went on with my schedule. What was it I had to do after work? Ah yes, the Commonwealth College meeting. Since I was early, I stopped to get some coffee. I walked by a group of girls and overheard them saying that classes had been cancelled. The only time classes had been cancelled was due to enormous amounts of snow. Yet that day, they were cancelled.

As I entered the Bluewall, my stomach turned, my ears stung and tears sprung to my eyes, blurring the lasting image before me. The Bluewall was completely packed ... and completely silent. Every eye locked onto that one television screen staring at the unbelievable. That is when I finally realized that what had happened that morning was real. It had to be - there were hundreds of college students in the same place barely even breathing. They were all focused on the same thing, not speaking. It would lake a national emergency to accomplish that. No raisin bagels with butter today - crumbling societies were on the menu instead - and everyone had a bitter bite.

Would our kids watch videos of this day in their classrooms? Was this going to be part of a textbook someday? Would it be a video clip shown during Social Studies class, together with the assassination of JFK, and Pearl Harbor? Everything I had learned about, it was always someone else's memories, someone else's experience. Now the experience was mine, I would be telling stories of where I was on September 11.

I stumbled backward out of the empty doors of the Campus Center trying to forget the expressions on the faces of my colleagues. I had to go to my meeting. It was a feeble attempt to pretend reality wasn’t caving in around me. There had to be something that wasn't affected by what happened, because that would mean that it wasn't that enormous, it wasn’t that bad. But when I got there, the meeting was cancelled. They were organizing vigils to remember all those who had died instead. All those people ... all those children... moms and dads, spouses and sisters, best friends and sons and daughters...the meeting was cancelled.

My head was spinning as I walked-through campus back to my dorm. Someone was ringing the church bells...and it was the loneliest sound I had ever heard. It was then on an empty campus, at two in the afternoon, by myself, did I realize that everything was going to change. My world, my country, reality as I knew it had been formed into something completely foreign and it scared the hell out of me.

The only other person in sight was a tall girl walking just ahead of me. She was clutching her cell phone battling busy signals as the rest of the country was. I listened to her trembling voice and watched her fingers fly. Then...she got through, she found who she was looking for- connection established. She stopped where she was and sank to the ground. “Oh my god, baby, are you okay? I was so scared." Sobbing relief and dirty Gucci jeans. Connection established - and that's all that mattered that day.

The dorm hallways of my dorm buzzed with newscasters’ “objective” reports, while the never-silent student population stared on, waiting for answers that weren't going to come. I just wanted my mom. We all did. We weren't so tough that day, or so smart. Our lives, our petty lives that had been filled with busy schedules and complaints about how gross Grab and Go's are, and the naive notion that we are educated people, that we are grown ups...it all fell away. And we finally shut up long enough to understand how fragile everything was. This entire infrastructure of America that has allowed us to become a dormant generation governed by self -achievement can actually be taken away from us.

Everything that was normal to us was forgotten that day - work, meetings, and classes. Everything scary, and real, and significant took their place. It was a cancellation of the daily schedule we mindlessly abide to, the end of a time when terrorism was what happened in other countries. We forgot about our roles as students. We forgot about all the ridiculous details that make up the canvas of our lives here at UMass. We forgot to live our lives the way we have always lived them. We forgot about the details – expensive jeans and joining societies. It didn't matter if you had a major that day at UMass, or how much money was in your checking account, or what the price of yogurt was - that was the day that was cancelled.

Resources Available to Campus Community

University Advising Resources
Mental Health Services
Faculty/Staff Assistance Program
Religious Life

Essay: One Year After
UMass Public Radio Remembers
UMass-9/11/01 Archive

Alumni & Staff Lost

Christoffer M. Carstanjen
Geoffrey W. Cloud, ’87
Tara Shea Creamer, ’93
Peter Hashem, ’83
Todd Russell Hill, ’90
John C. Jenkins, ’83
Thomas N. Pecorelli, ’92
Sheryl Lynn (Rosner) Rosenbaum, ’90
David Ellis Rivers, ’83
Jessica Sachs, ’01