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Mother picture with lost twins4/17/2023 “At that point, I started to get the feeling that she was gone.” My father spent the week scouring emergency rooms, poring over sign-in sheets for her name while my sister and I stayed with my grandmother. He waited there until night fell, and then started searching hospitals across the five boroughs. “It was just horrible to see these people running away, covered in dust, coughing, choking, trying to get out of there. “We couldn’t go any further because all of the people were coming from that area, and the dust … was so thick that we couldn’t even see past that point,” Ben said. He and a co-worker whose mother worked in one of the towers sped toward lower Manhattan, and made it as far as South Street Seaport near the Brooklyn Bridge. “I tried several times, and then the lines went dead,” he said. United Flight 175 struck the south tower 16 minutes later, tearing through the building a few floors beneath AON’s offices.īen grabbed his phone. The north tower had been hit first, at 8:46 a.m. “A plane just flew into the World Trade Center.” My father was in a chair giving blood when someone burst in. He and his co-workers at the city Department of Environmental Protection went to a blood drive in Queens. Don’t wait for anybody - just get out of the building.” The conversation continues to haunt him.Īfter giving her his usual goodbye kiss and saying “I love you,” he drove to work in the Bronx. You have two daughters you need to come home to. “If you hear of anything, leave the building immediately. “You have to be careful,” he told her that morning. In September 2001, my mother was 39 years old. My sister was born two years later I arrived three years after that. My parents met at my aunt’s hair salon, and married in 1993. Sol Valiente was a New York City native who grew up in the Bronx my grandmother raised her as a single parent. She worked for AON, a British-owned multinational insurance company that had offices on several of the upper floors of the south tower. They discussed the recent bomb threat at the twin towers. They arrived early, so they sat in the car talking and eating buttered rolls from a coffee cart. 11, 2001, Ben Colon drove his wife to work at the World Trade Center. It’s a very different story for my father. But I was only 3, and remember nothing about that day. People who are just a few years older than I am can say exactly where they were when the twin towers fell. This happens several times throughout the memorial the final bell marks the the moment after both towers were left in pieces, leaving more than 2,750 people dead. The site becomes devastatingly quiet it feels like the moment of silence can be felt across the country. The eeriest element of the annual service is the bells that track the timeline of the attacks: At 8:46 a.m., the service comes to a dead stop and a bell rings to signify the minute when the north tower was struck. Some wear shirts like my father’s others carry framed photos or even the missing-person flyers that are artifacts from the immediate aftermath of the attacks. It brings them solace to listen to the names of their loved ones be read by fellow mourners. Many families of the lost visit the memorial on Sept. My father still goes every year wearing a shirt with my mother’s bright, sweet face printed across it. I stopped going to that annual service a few years ago, when I turned 18. Sol and Ben Colon with their daughters, Alexis (bottom) and Shayla, on New Year's Eve 1999. Ground zero is the spot on the map where too much of my heartbreak and lost memories are buried - a literal pit of despair. 11, when the site is thronged by politicians as well as other grieving families. This visit gets harder every year, but for me it’s better than being there on Sept. I break off a few of the roses at the stems and tuck the flowers into the letters.
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