I was distracted by mundane tasks for much of today, but was buoyed by this lovely post by

On that day I was teaching first-year writing in the basement of Andrews Hall, the English building at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. When I walked upstairs after class, the library was packed with my teachers and graduate school classmates, and we watched the towers fall together.

I spent the rest of the day with a friend watching the obsessive news footage, which shows the planes crashing into the towers over and over again. Finally, I could take no more and biked home after dark.

I turned on the radio for company. NPR had recruited a grief counselor to take calls from people who had lost loved ones, from police and soldiers who felt they had let the country down, and from those of us who had no direct connection to NYC except through our national ties. I lay on the floor in the dark and listened to healing on the radio, and eventually those clenched loops of news footage loosened and I was able to slip into bed.

That’s what I remember best of that day, and it’s consistent with Mary’s theme: instead of fixating on destruction, NPR was actively trying to piece people back together. It was the first thing that gave me hope during that awful time.