Giving voice to 9/11 when there's nothing left to say

"Turn on the tv."
That's what my husband said when he called me the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
I was nursing our new baby and home on maternity leave from my newspaper job.
When I switched on NBC, I saw the second plane hit the tower.
My husband and I said nothing for a minute but we stayed connected by phone.
What just happened?
No pundit could say for sure. And then they knew, we all would know it was terrorism. How could this happen here?
I wondered for a bit what kind of a world I had brought my son into.
But then people seemed to pull together in the wake of the attack.
They gathered on street corners with candles and put American flags in their cars.
The patriotism was palpable.
But the solidarity was fleeting.
By the time I returned back to work in October, I knew 9/11 was what I would be writing about.
I often got the death stories.
I loved and loathed this fact. The stories were an opportunity to give voice to people who had lost so much and yet the reporting felt unbearably intrusive.
The run up for the courage to ask a stranger to fill me in on their tragedy and loss seemed to always take forever.
There were times when I could not even get out of my car. I often prayed no one would answer my phone call .
My first 9/11 story was the six month milestone, then a year.
It was an exercise that made me really understand the word terrorism, to feel the horror in my bones. The assignment from my editor was to meet with the local families who lost loved ones and find out how they were coping.
It was raining out when I pulled up to the family home of American Airlines flight attendant Jean Roger. A frayed red white and blue ribbon on their door was whipping in the wind.
Jean's dad let me into their lives that day and everyday I called for a story on the 9/11 commission or how the 9/11 families coped during the holidays. He would share his feelings after five years too.
Then one day, Jean's dad told me he just could not talk anymore.
There wasn't anything more to say.
It wasn't personal.
Politics, posturing and wars had overshadowed the fact that several thousand ordinary Americans died - his beautiful girl among them.
Ten years later I think of Jean and her dad.
I wish them peace.
I wish that for us all.