Remembering Sept. 11

The air was extraordinarily crisp and clear, and the sky unusually blue when I emerged from the subway station on Sept. 11, 2001, and headed to my office building at 140 Broadway across from the World Trade Center.

Aside from the great weather, 9/11 started off just like any other day in Lower Manhattan.

I entered my building, took the elevator up to the 36th floor, greeted the few people who had arrived before me, and eased into my work day with a cup of coffee. I sat at my desk and began reviewing and responding to numerous emails from clients and co-workers. It was the exact same routine I always looked forward to, and followed every weekday morning.

Then, the ordinariness of the day was suddenly shattered by a stunning bang, followed immediately by strong vibrations that caused my building to sway back and forth.

The coffee in the mug I was holding splattered all over my chest and seconds later I felt the steaming liquid scorching my skin. But the burning pain was soon subsumed by an even more awful, truly nauseating sensation that my building was about to tip over.

I had no idea what had happened. I thought perhaps it was an earthquake, but within moments my father, Steve, called me from work, asking whether I knew that a plane had “accidentally” struck one of the World Trade Center towers.

A plane? Hitting one of the towers? Couldn’t be. So into the phone I said, “Daddy. Hang on a sec, I’m gonna go see what’s going on.” I was about to head down the hall to my boss’s office to find out what he knew.

But as I sprang from my chair, I felt a second enormous impact and my building began to sway and shudder again.

The phone fell out of my hand and crashed to the floor, along with my desk lamp, but I could still hear my dad’s voice yelling, “Gather your stuff and get out of the building! Go anywhere, anywhere at all! I’ll come get you wherever you wind up. Take a boat, a cab, a train, whatever. Just get yourself out! Go. Go. Go now!”

I grabbed the phone from the floor and held it to my ear again, as my father tried to calmly explain to me that he had just seen on his office’s conference room television that another plane had struck the second tower. It was in that instant that the world knew this was by no means a freak accident but rather, a highly calculated plan of mass destruction.

So I threw my laptop into my briefcase, and disregarding the message on the PA system to “remain calm and stay seated,” I rounded up the few people who also were early-arrivers to work, and told them we had to leave. But as we approached the elevator bank, we discovered the elevators had already been shut off for “safety reasons.”

So we found the fire stairs and bolted down all 36 flights, along with many workers from other floors. I didn’t notice anyone having difficulty on the stairs; no one in a wheelchair, no one on crutches, no one obese or elderly. It was mostly people just like me — in their 30s and 40s, probably with spouses and young children at home.

To this day, I wonder whether, had I come across anyone in need of assistance, I would have stopped to help them. I’d like to think I would have, but given the extraordinary circumstances, I can’t guarantee how I would have processed someone else’s need for help relative to my own need to escape safely.

The moment we exited the building, our eyes, which had grown accustomed to the dimly lit stairwell, were blinded by sunlight, and our faces were blasted with heat that forced me to squint. Involuntarily, I turned my head up to see the blazing towers above me.

Each tower, at the higher floors, had a giant, gaping hole in its side out of which I could see raging balls of fire, angry-looking flames, and swirly clouds of thick, evil black smoke. It was so completely unfathomable that it looked fake, like computer-generated special effects from a low budget horror movie. I half expected to see Godzilla emerge from one of the buildings.

My blistering, coffee-burned skin and everything else bombarding my senses during those atrocious first moments out of the building were completely forgotten when a naked leg suddenly flew over my head. I knew it was a man’s leg because it was hairy below the knee, and a man’s shoe and sock were covering its foot.

The thud it made as it hit the road behind me reminded me of the sound my physics and organic chemistry textbooks made when I tossed them out of my third-story dorm room window after taking my final exams in college.

Like the flaming towers though, a human limb flying through the air was so completely incredible that it seemed unreal. I resisted the ghoulish temptation to turn around to look at it, and instead just kept moving forward.

My eyes were fixed on my feet. I was totally dazed and had tears streaming down my face, but still acutely aware that every single step I took was one step further away from the scene that, to this day, I still cannot speak about out loud.

On the street, there was absolute chaos. People were looking frantically up toward the blazing buildings like rubberneckers on a highway, straining to see the gruesome details of a head-on collision.

And the air was filled with papers and debris from the many offices with shattered windows. It was like a ticker tape parade, but the paper seemed so anomalous because there was no celebration, and no revelers. Just horror.

While many people could not tear themselves away, I had an infant and a 4-year-old at home and was not about to stick around for what I anticipated would be a massive explosion, laden with more body parts and fragments of flying metal and glass. It did not occur to me in that moment, or at any other moment before it actually happened, that the buildings would not explode, but rather, that they would implode.

With the two people I could convince to leave the scene with me, I recommended that we head north. We didn’t know what to expect next, or where it might occur. Nevertheless, we pressed on through the bedlam.

My mantra with each step was: “I’m not dying today. I won’t and I can’t.”

I must have repeated that phrase in my head, to myself, several thousand times that day, as I just kept placing one foot in front of the other, until we eventually reached a K-Mart on Astor Place in Greenwich Village. We went to the electronics department in the basement in order to get a sense of what was going on.

Since all cellular service had been disabled, we knew nothing other than the rumors we’d heard on the street. We quickly learned that the towers had both just imploded. While we saw the replay of the implosions in slow motion on each of the television banks, about six times in as many minutes, it was completely incomprehensible to us because those buildings were part of the local landscape we saw every day from our office windows.

Still reeling from these images, we mapped out a strategy that would enable us to avoid all of the other local landmarks in Manhattan that we feared could be the next target. And the farther away we got from Lower Manhattan, the more the chaos seemed to subside.

Eventually we split up, as we each had friends or family members in the city who we knew would not mind if we just showed up at their apartments unexpectedly. We wished each other well and promised to be in touch the next day to confirm we were all safe.

Now on my own, I made my way to the Upper East Side. People were milling about, walking barefoot, crying and sometimes bloody, looking bewildered and dazed. But there was much less hysteria, relatively speaking at least to where I had been.

And as I kept moving, I noticed a middle-aged couple walking arm in arm, smiling and chatting, and pointing at items on display in store windows. They seemed completely oblivious to the mayhem all around them. “Do they not know?” I asked myself.

After a 4.5-hour walk, in heels, and carrying an over-stuffed briefcase, I arrived at my cousin’s apartment building on East 86th Street. I took the elevator up to her floor, and when she opened the door, she threw her arms around me and we wept.

The entire city was at a standstill. There was nowhere for me to go until evening when the bridges, tunnels and subways eventually reopened. So we sat down in front of her television and watched CNN all afternoon, unstoppable tears streaming down both of our faces.

Later that night, I was able to get myself onto a train to Mamaroneck, N.Y., where my parents drove to meet me.

I will always remember the look of relief that washed over their faces as I exited the train and headed down the platform toward the outstretched arms of my mother, Sandy.

Again, the tears flowed. Tears of joy that I had made it out of Lower Manhattan, along with tears of sorrow and grief for the thousands of much less fortunate people who had not.

My memories of the several days following the terrorist attacks are sparse; I only recall spending them at home with my children, feeling very vulnerable and exposed.

Then the following week, when it was considered “safe” to go back to work, I returned with a steely resolve to what had suddenly been re-named “Ground Zero.” It was tough. The air quality was terrible, the entire area smelled like burnt, unseasoned meat, and going down into the subway fearful of another potential attack took every bit of strength I had.

But as horrible as that time was for me, I still experience feelings of unbearable guilt that it wasn’t even worse. I survived the ordeal while so many other people, in such close proximity to me that day, are all dead.

I cringe when I see or hear those innocent victims being described as having “perished” or “lost their lives” on 9/11. Nobody just “perished” and nobody lost anything. These people were terrorized and they were murdered. Plain and simple. Sugar-coating the genocide that occurred, by using bland euphemisms, is offensive to me.

And for me and the many others down at Ground Zero on 9/11, there will always be some “survivor’s guilt.”

To ease it, I make a conscious decision when I wake up each day to live it as well, as fully, as happily, and as charitably as humanly possible. I do this not only for myself and my family because I appreciate my good fortune to be among the living, but also for those who died but didn’t deserve to.

Even though most of them were strangers to me, I feel I owe them that much.

Editor’s note: Nancy Lyness moved to Pleasanton in 2007. She continues to work (most often remotely from Pleasanton) on a full-time basis as a partner in the same New York City law firm where she was working on 9/11. She wrote this account in 2009 at the suggestion of family members and friends who wanted her to share the experience in writing because she was just not able to speak about it aloud.

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