My mom is a 9/11 survivor, a title that, like survivors of most any traumatic occurrence, has no resplendent quality. It’s a weighty badge, earned from a day marred by fear, death and an irrevocable connection to something huge and horrible.
And yet, it’s a title that I felt I’d inherited in part through her experience. For as long as I can remember, the events of that day have been present with me, soldered deeply into my psyche, though I wasn’t there to witness them firsthand. It was a confusing amalgam of emotions, largely compounded by my mom’s general reticence to discuss the topic outside of a personal account she self-published several years ago to process her yearslong PTSD. I struggled to know if I had the right to grieve something that happened to her, and not to me.
