Translator: Karen Brady Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
The last night I slept beside my husband Dave,
I barely noticed he was there.
He had come in late from a work dinner
and had an early business trip the next morning.
If Dave kissed me in the dark before dawn, I don't remember.
I had recently left my job to stay at home full time with our kids.
Ben was almost four, Molly was two,
and at seven months pregnant, I was basically exhausted all the time,
so when he left, I was sound asleep.
Later that morning, the kids and I found love notes on the kitchen table.
They were signed, "See you in a couple of days. Love you, Daddy."
Dave called to touch base from the airport.
Today was Ben's first day of preschool, and he was missing it.
We got to chat for a few minutes, and then suddenly he said,
"They're calling us to board. I've got to go.
I'll call you tonight. I love you."
After dropping the kids at preschool, I headed towards the grocery store.
On the way, I turned off the kids' music and put on NPR.
They were saying something about a plane that had crashed in New York.
As I pulled up to the grocery store, I heard the reporter say
that the flight that had crashed was American Airlines Flight 11.
I had no idea what Dave's flight number was;
he travelled pretty often,
so it was an endless string of numbers.
"Nah," I thought. "Go in, do the shopping, don't be ridiculous!"
But there I sat,
in the grocery store parking lot with the motor running.
It was about 9:30, and something told me,
"Just go home and check Dave's itinerary.
Just check!"
I got home, I booted up his computer -
my hand shaking on the mouse -
still thinking, "I live such a normal, boring, ordinary life.
Things like this don't happen to people like me."
I opened his calendar, and there it was:
"8 a.m. flight, Boston to Los Angeles,
American Airlines Flight 11."
It was September 11th, 2001,
a spectacularly beautiful fall day in New England,
with a sky so blue everyone remembers.
Our kids lost their dad that day,
and I, I lost my first love.
And things were never going to be the same again for us or the country.
The days after, complete blur.
But what I do remember
is being surrounded by people helping in every conceivable way.
My mom and dad, my siblings, friends and neighbours,
even strangers from around the country and around the world
were sending flowers and gifts,
and it seemed that everywhere I turned
there was another casserole for my freezer,
or new colouring books for the kids.
That love, that support, that generosity
is truly what I believe
enabled us to get through those really, really dark days.
I think that's why I was so struck a few months after the attacks
by a segment I saw on "Oprah."
The US had recently invaded Afghanistan, the target being the Taliban,
the regime that had brutalised the country and trained all of the 9/11 hijackers.
Oprah's story focused on the lives of women under Taliban rule.
School was forbidden for girls.
Women were not allowed to work outside their home
and were essentially stripped of all basic human rights.
Violation of any of these "rules"
could result in public flogging or even execution.
I was stunned!
Even worse was the fate of widows.
Because women were not allowed to walk outside their home
without a male relative,
it meant that widows were often prisoners of their own homes.
And worse yet,
your in-laws could take your kids from you
and kick you out of your home.
My heart went out to these women,
and honestly,
it made me sick to think about how I was treated compared to them.
As a 9/11 widow, I was given this almost hero-like status,
and these widows were almost erased out of existence.
I so desperately wanted to understand and make sense of it.
How could the Taliban treat women so inhumanely?
And how could the terrorists have done what they did?
And why would they hate America so much?
In my mind, I often had conversations with Osama Bin Laden.
I had them while I was walking the dog,
or driving or even taking a shower.
And I knew that these conversations were crazy,
but I was just so curious and driven to understand.
We are all human. How does one lose sight of that?
Recognising I was never going to have a sit down with Bin Laden,
I became convinced
that if only I could speak with an Afghan woman,
someone who had lost her husband as I had,
that we could learn from each other
and understand one another.
Looking back, even in the earliest, most overwhelming days of widowhood,
I never really felt completely helpless.
And I began making choices right away.
One of the first was T-Ball.
Just a few days after 9/11,
I was running the bases with Ben at his first ever T-Ball practice.
You see, Ben loves sports.
So he'd been talking and dreaming about T-Ball for weeks.
His Dad had just been murdered
in the worst attack on our country since Pearl Harbor,
and I knew I couldn't bring his dad back.
But I also knew I could take Ben to T-Ball.
And as trivial as it may seem,
I was choosing to keep life as normal as possible
during these times that were anything but normal.
The women that I saw on Oprah,
even their normal looked horrible.
And they had no good choices, at least none that I could see.
The inequity of our fates
shook me to my core,
and I knew I had to do something.
At the time,
I probably couldn't even have told you where Afghanistan was on a map,
but it didn't matter,
because I made one really small choice.
And that simple, ultra-small choice was this:
just help one!
Reach out and support an Afghan widow
in the very same way
that all of those people had reached out to support me
when I needed it most.
Soon after the Oprah segment,
I met Patty, another 9/11 widow from the Boston area,
and I told her of my idea
to reach out and support Afghan widows.
And Patty pounced on it!
We brainstormed fundraising ideas
and together landed on a three-day bike ride
from Ground Zero, in New York City, back to Boston.
In that first year, we raised over $150,000!
Enough to help hundreds of widows and her family.
And so our non-profit was born, called "Beyond the 11th."
In the spirit of,
"Don't just give them a fish, teach her to fish",
we fund programs that teach women income-generating skills
so that she can support herself and her family.
In addition, we help them create community savings and loan programs
so that women have access to capital
for things like starting a small business or to pay school fees.
In 2006,
I got my wish to visit Kabul and meet many of these women.
Some people thought I was nuts
to leave our kids and travel to Afghanistan.
And I'm not going to lie to you, I was terrified, truly scared.
But I felt like I had to go,
that I would have a special connection with these women,
and I was right!
The language barrier made little difference
because we connected as women everywhere do:
we shared stories and food, pride in our kids,
we laughed and we cried,
and there was no them, there was only us.
I totally get how rage connects people.
It raises our adrenaline and gives us this false sense of power.
We saw that after 9/11,
when Americans of all different politics and beliefs
united against a single foe.
But that "us versus them" is a false binary,
and it's a choice we can change.
Patty's brother Jim, who happens to be a priest,
put it like this:
"There's a way in which each of us makes small choices every day,
and after a time, those choices develop a pattern.
Each moral and ethical choice forms our identity."
He continues,
"It seems to me that the terrorists who flew the planes into the buildings,
they started making choices a long time ago,
choices that took them so far off path
that flying a plane into a building seemed like the right thing to do."
It's like any one of us:
we choose our way into being ourselves.
I never really expected to get an answer to the question,
How could the terrorists have done what they did?
Yet to me, this is the answer - so simple, but so profound.
We choose our way into being ourselves.
And that means if we can choose our way into,
we can choose our way out of.
It's obvious to me now that what seemed liked tiny choices -
taking Ben to T-Ball, deciding to help a widow like me -
that they were far more powerful than I realised.
The loss of Dave forced me to pause, lift my head up from the grief,
imagine my way forward.
People often estimate the power of their own choices -
they underestimate the power of their own choices.
I think it's because
we often think of choices as things with clearly defined answers.
Do I want coffee or tea? Do I want to read this book or that?
But the idea of choosing the kind of person we want to be,
well, that's also a choice.
The difference is, we don't pause often enough
to decide and think about,
"Who do I want to be, and how do I want to be in this world?"
The truth is,
humanity is not something that just happens;
it takes practice.
We aren't born yoga masters;
you have to learn those crazy moves and practice them a lot.
In that very same way,
we need to learn to treat each other humanely.
And then, we need to choose to practice it,
again and again and again.
In addition to my non-profit work, I'm a leadership coach,
helping people uncover their personal patterns,
to uncover the idea
that we all have the power to pivot,
to choose differently.
If only the terrorists had made a different choice.
As it turns out,
Mohamed Atta was sitting just one seat away from Dave.
What if Atta had looked at Dave
and instead of seeing an abstract enemy,
had seen a father,
a son, a brother, a husband?
What if he had paused and pulled a U-turn?
It's not an impossibility.
We all have the power to pull a U-turn in our own lives.
In our country today, the enemy has changed.
After 9/11, it was the them that lived over there,
and today, the enemy is here, and it's us.
It's anyone who wears the wrong colour hat -
you know what I mean -
or lives in a different region,
or just simply looks different than us.
It's so divisive, and it is so toxic,
and it is a choice.
When we boil it all down,
we're really simply just the product of all of the small choices that we make.
And sadly, in many parts of the world,
hunger and desperation make for impossible choices.
Do you know what one of the most powerful recruitment tools
the Taliban used?
Rice!
The Taliban would knock on doors in poor villages and say,
"Give us your son,
and we will train him and educate him,
and in exchange, we will give you rice,
enough to feed you and your whole family."
By providing widows the skills to earn her own income
and to nurture her self-reliance and independence,
she gains the power not to choose rice.
In the years since 9/11, I've often been asked,
"How were you able to go on?
Didn't you want to just curl up and give up?"
But giving up was never an option;
I had two very young kids and a newborn named Deana
to think about.
And in that horrible moment when I knew that Dave was gone,
after letting out a guttural scream,
I had an almost out-of-body awareness
that I would love again,
maybe even marry again.
My life would go on,
different, but still full and still good.
In 2006, I married Donald,
a kind, loving and truly courageous man
who took on the particular challenge
of becoming a father and a husband
in a family marked by one of our country's greatest and most tragic public tragedies.
Together we had to decide,
What do we want this new family unit to look like?
How do we want to move forward?
And in 2008, we welcomed our daughter Rebecca.
Life did not end on September 11th;
we did not let it.
Here's how I think of it now:
On 9/11, I was given an opportunity,
a chance to pause, recognise my life would be different
and to really consider, Who am I? Who do I want to be?
And how do I want to move through this life?
At Dave's memorial service, just a couple of days after he was killed,
I spoke about the incredible man that he was,
and how he brought so much love and so much joy
to everyone who knew him.
I also spoke about a choice I made to focus,
not on the hatred that stole our kids' father from them,
but rather to focus on the love and the humanity
that brought them into this world.
The world belongs to all of us;
we get to choose how to be in it.
Thank you.
(Applause)