Kathleen

Kathleen, who is in her mid-sixties, paused initially when asked to recall Sept. 11, 2001. “I am wondering how it is that we had the television on?” she says. “I don’t remember physically turning it on.” A lifelong resident of Portland, Kathleen worked in management at a major healthcare organization at the time. She was also tending to her mother, who was dying. She was already watching the television “in horror” when the crash of the second plane was caught on camera. Then the Pentagon, and the plane in Pennsylvania.

The numbers announced on television stand out for her. “I believe they said that it was possible that 56,000 people might have been at work in those towers,” she says. “So when I learned later that 1,100 people had died all I could think was, it could’ve been much worse.”

She recalls vividly her drive to work. “As I was looking at other people in other cars, I realized that everyone else was listening to the radio, too,” she says. “It was a sense of connection that I’ve never experienced before.”

By the time she arrived at work a television had been turned on in the gym. As a manager Kathleen says she told people to do whatever they need to do. But as a human she did something else. “I reached out to a woman who was sitting on a bench and put my hand on her shoulder,” she says. “There was this sense of shock. You could see that the news people were horrified. None of us were sure if it was over or not.”