In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, there were two images that were difficult for me to get out of my head.

First and foremost were the displays of photos and notices put up by people whose friends or relatives were missing and/or presumed dead. The collapse of the Twin Towers wasn't an event in which it was easy to figure who had been inside and who hadn't, and the attack had happened early enough in the day that it wasn't too much of a stretch to hope that a loved one hadn't yet arrived at work.

[caption id="attachment_1375" align="alignright" width="265" caption="Dead ... or perhaps alive?"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/posters.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-1375" title="posters" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/posters.jpg" alt="" width="265" height="202" /></a>[/caption]

Hope dies hard.

Amid all the horror of that day, it's easy to forget that initially, we expected the news  to be much worse than it actually turned out to be. The initial speculation was that there might have been as many as 25 or 30 thousand people in the towers when they collapsed. I remember one of the more poignant quotes from that week came from New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani when someone asked him what the ultimate death toll would be.

<em>"Almost too much to bear."</em>

For all the talk about the damage done that day to our economy and to our national fabric, all that seems insignificant next to the tens of thousands of Americans who lost husbands or wives, mothers or fathers, sons or daughters or just close friends.  Economies recover, national fabrics are re-woven, but the personal losses suffered on that day are the kind many people never recover from.

[caption id="attachment_1376" align="alignleft" width="230" caption="The falling man"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/fallingman-lg.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1376" title="fallingman-lg" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/fallingman-lg-230x300.jpg" alt="" width="230" height="300" /></a>[/caption]

The second picture is even more poignant. While the images most people see again and again are of the planes hitting the towers, or of the towers collapsing, the pictures I will never forget are of people on the upper floors, knowing they had no hope of surviving, choosing to meet death in their own way.

Some who jumped were more than 90 stories up.

I've been that high in the World Trade Center. In 1979, my first wife and I ate at Windows on the World on the 106th floor of the North Tower. I'm uneasy enough with heights that I wouldn't even have gone near a window, so I can only imagine how  desperate a choice it must have been for someone to step off into space.

I remember thinking about how long it must have taken to fall, and I remember what I wrote about it at the time.

<em>It took a very long time. It took the rest of their lives.</em>

I don't know their names, but 10 days after the attacks, I wrote a Web column in which I said we needed to remember people like Claudia Martinez Foster and Jeannine Damiani-Jones, Lynne Morris and Monica Goldstein. I said our challenge in the weeks, months and years ahead would be to remember Nigel Thompson, who had a Superman tattoo on his left ankle. To remember Pete Ortiz, the father of 6-month-old twins who will never know their dad. To remember Gerald Baptiste, one of the firefighters who went into the building to try and save lives and didn’t come out.

I don't know if we imagined then the twists and turns fate would take over the next 10 years. I don't think history will view us kindly for going to war with a country that had nothing to do with the attacks, or with our government doing so much to restrict our civil liberties or with the massive deficits we have run so that we could keep taxes low on the rich.

Sadly, I don't think any of that had much to do with Sept. 11, 2001. I think the folks running our government used the attacks as excuses to do what they would have done anyway, and besides, I have always believed that we get the government we deserve.

What happened then and what has happened since wasn't about governments.

It was about people.

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