Remembering 9/11

Remembering 9/11:  The Trip I Never Took

By Leatha Lamison-White

Twenty-five years ago today, I was packing for a business trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I lived in Bowie, Maryland, and my flight was scheduled to leave from BWI. Business travel was part of my life, but packing was always the worst part. I remember dragging my feet, trying to finish the task so I could get on with the rest of my morning.

I hadn’t turned on the television. I was focused on packing, thinking about the flight ahead and the ordinary details of getting out the door: what I needed to bring, whether I had packed enough, how long it would take to get to the airport.

Nothing about that morning felt important. That is one of the things I remember most clearly now. The day began with the kind of routine we rarely notice while we are living it. I was thinking about a suitcase. I was thinking about a schedule. I was thinking about what came next.

Michael, my husband, was already at work in downtown Washington, D.C. He had taken the Metro that morning. Our boys were at school, and because I was supposed to travel, Michael planned to pick them up that afternoon.

It was an ordinary morning, with ordinary plans.

We had no reason to believe that the shape of our lives was about to change.

Then the landline rang.

I almost didn’t answer.

That small hesitation has stayed with me. I was busy with something so unimportant, and yet I nearly missed the voice that would pull me out of my ordinary morning and into a reality none of us understood.

When I finally picked up, it was Michael.

“Do you know what’s going on in the world?” he asked.

I didn’t.

He told me about the planes, the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the crash in Pennsylvania. All flights had been canceled.

I turned on the television.

In an instant, my small world of suitcases, schedules, and travel plans disappeared.

The images repeated again and again. I watched them, trying to make sense of something that made no sense. I forgot to eat. I forgot to drink water. I simply sat there and watched.

There are moments when the mind cannot absorb what the eyes are seeing. The pictures were real, but they seemed impossible. I kept waiting for some explanation that would make the events feel contained, something that would tell me where the danger ended and where safety began.

No such explanation came.

Then the shock gave way to fear.

I thought about Michael.

He was downtown. He needed to get back to his car, but the Metro was overflowing with people desperate to get home to their families. I knew he was there, and I could do nothing to help him.

That helplessness was its own kind of terror. I could not reach into the city and bring him home. I could not protect him. I could not even know exactly where he was or what he was seeing. All I could do was wait, listen, and hope.

Then I thought about our boys.

They were safe at school, but classes had been canceled. The students had gathered in the auditorium to watch the news on a large screen. Their father was trying to get to them.

I imagined them sitting together, surrounded by other children and adults, watching a world they were too young to fully understand become frightening. I thought about how much they needed the reassurance of their father’s arrival—and how much I needed it too.

That day, being a wife and mother felt different.

The roles I had always carried suddenly seemed less like ordinary parts of daily life and more like promises: to protect, to remain steady, to get everyone home, even when the world itself no longer felt safe.

The distance between safety and danger suddenly seemed impossibly small.

My mother-in-law, Margaret, called from Omaha. She was worried because she thought I worked downtown. I told her I was safe, but I could hear the concern in her voice when I told her that Michael was stuck downtown. 

Her fear reached across the miles and joined mine. We were both waiting for the same thing: news that Michael was safe. In that moment, geography did not make the worry smaller. It only meant that we were frightened in different places, unable to do anything but wait for the phone to ring again.

Meanwhile, friends and coworkers were scattered across the country. Some were already on airplanes. Some were in New York. Two of my coworkers were on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, Flight 93, United. 

The enormity of the day became personal in ways I could not escape. The people being discussed on television were not strangers. They had names, families, routines, responsibilities, and plans for the day. They had expected to arrive somewhere. They had expected to make phone calls, attend meetings, return home.

Their lives had been interrupted in the middle of ordinary plans, just as mine had been.

One colleague working at the Pentagon survived because he had walked to the cafeteria for a sausage biscuit. His work area was destroyed.

That detail has always stayed with me—not because the biscuit mattered, but because of what it revealed. A small, everyday decision had placed him somewhere else at the exact moment everything changed. It reminded me how much of life rests on moments we never recognize as significant until afterward.

Another coworker in New York told us what it was like to run for his life, wearing nothing but the shirt on his back, alongside countless others racing toward the river.

I have tried to imagine the fear of that escape, the confusion, the dust, the noise, and the instinct to keep moving. But some experiences are too large to fully imagine from a distance. I could listen to his words, but I could never truly know what it meant to be there.

These weren’t just names on television.

They were people I knew.

People I worked with.

People whose voices I had heard and whose lives were connected to mine.

Their stories changed the way I understood the word “ordinary.” A coworker walking to a cafeteria. A family waiting for someone to come home. Children sitting in a school auditorium. A woman packing for a trip she would never take.

The world no longer felt ordinary. It felt terribly fragile.

No one knew what would happen next. We did not know whether the attacks were over, whether more were coming, or whether the people we loved would make it home. The uncertainty seemed to stretch endlessly.

I was afraid.

Everyone was afraid.

And yet, even in that fear, people began doing what people do in moments of crisis. They searched for one another. They made phone calls. They opened their homes. They waited at schools, stations, offices, and doorways. They tried to create small islands of safety in a world that had suddenly become unfamiliar.

The trip to Albuquerque never happened.

Twenty-five years later, I still have never been there.

Sometimes I think about that—a place I had never seen becoming permanently attached to a day I will never forget. Albuquerque exists in my memory not as a destination, but as a symbol of the life I thought I was going to continue living that morning.

The suitcase represented more than a business trip. It represented the assumption that the day ahead would resemble the day before it. It represented the quiet confidence we carry without realizing it: that plans will hold, that people will travel and return, that the future will arrive in the form we expect.

September 11 took away that confidence.

But it also revealed something else. It showed me how deeply our lives are connected—to spouses waiting in cities, children waiting in schools, mothers waiting across the country, coworkers whose ordinary decisions suddenly become matters of life and death.

When I remember September 11, I don’t think first about the suitcase I was packing or the trip I was supposed to take.

I think about Michael downtown.

I think about our boys waiting for their father to come get them.

I think about Margaret calling from Omaha, carrying her fear across the miles.

I think about the coworkers who never came home and the ones who survived by the smallest margins.

I think about the phone call that changed the morning.

And I think about how quickly an ordinary day can become a dividing line between before and after.

Before, I believed in the quiet continuity of things. After, I understood that ordinary life is not guaranteed—but it is precious precisely because it is ordinary.

Twenty-five years have passed.

The world kept moving.

Our boys grew up.

Life went on.

There were birthdays, holidays, graduations, illnesses, celebrations, and all the small moments that make up a life. Time did what time always does: it carried us forward, even while part of us remained standing in that morning.

But September 11 remains.

The fear has faded, but the memory has not. The sharpness has softened, but the meaning has deepened. I no longer remember only what happened. I remember what was revealed: how quickly certainty can disappear, how helpless love can feel, and how much we depend on one another when the world becomes frightening.

I also remember that the day was filled not only with destruction, but with courage, compassion, sacrifice, and people trying to find their way home.

Some days, remembering is its own kind of honoring.

So I remember the people who were lost.

I remember the people who survived.

I remember the families who carried the grief forward.

I remember Michael making his way home with the boys. 

I remember our boys waiting. I remember their innocent faces. 

And I remember the life I was living before the phone rang—a life I did not know was about to become part of history.  

United Airlines Flight 93, I remember you Marion Britton and Waleski Martinez.   

I remember. I will never forget that day. 

By Leatha Lamison-White