I reached William who was in LA. He’d flown the previous morning on the same United flight that would, this day, go down in Pennsylvania. Nick, Adair’s boyfriend then and husband now, had been doing a temp job in the World Trade Center area, and we couldn’t get through to him for several hours. When Adair finally reached him, he said, “I’m okay: and remember, I’ve already been attacked by terrorists.”

This was the first time I heard the story, how as a child in the 80s on vacation with his parents and sisters, they were in plane that had been targeted by a Libyan bomber. Because there was a strong tail wind behind the plane that day and it was ahead of schedule, the bomb exploded when the place was at a lower altitude than intended. It blew a hole in the side of plane and a dozen people lost their lives. Nick and his family saw it all from across the aisle. Without that tail wind, the whole plane would have exploded. My son-in-law is not a religious guy, but he is well aware as a result of this experience that every day is a gift.

I wanted to turn around and go back to New York, to help somehow, but the message was clear: New York has 8 million people; your mother has one child. So we kept driving south, glued to the radio and later the TV. We drove back five days later, a flag-lined route, and when we approach Manhattan Island, what was left of the Towers was still smoking. The next morning I saw a guy running and a woman washing her windows on the outside. They stirred me from my state of shock. Yes, there had been a tragedy of gargantuan proportions, but like them, I’d still need to tend to daily life: exercise, housework, the next indicated thing.

And today those names were so many. If we added on the first responders who’ve died since from 9/11-related conditions, and the military personnel who died in service in the aftermath (whether they should have been sent or not), the reading of the names would go into the night. As I listened, I tried to hold each person in my mind as an individual, albeit one I never knew. There were names of every ethnicity. I wondered when I heard an Italian name if that man’s grandparents had known mine back in the Old Country, or when it was an Irish name, if that woman’s great-grandparents had been on the same ship as mine. For every individual lost and every family touched, I want to do something. I can serve in some way, as the President said, but beyond that, I’m left with the running, and the windows.

It’s cloudy today in New York with a cold, misty rain. Appropriate weather for the day at hand. And I’m waiting for a delayed flight to Los Angeles. This is the first time I’ve flown on 9/11 since the 9/11, and I guess a lot of people refuse to fly on this day (I heard the security personnel say that the passenger load was as light as they’d expected). It’s a particularly eerie day for me because in our family, the mourning of this day is 48 hours long. Two years ago, September 12, 2007, my stepson James died of a freak illness. He was sixteen. William and I had spent the week in Los Angeles, and we were at the airport there, the one I’ll be flying into, when the call came in that turned our lives upside down. It was another one of those forever memories: the Target store in North Carolina, the Delta gate at LAX.

As a person of faith, these are the experiences that test it and try it. Those of us who believe in eternal life as much as we believe in this one can have a problem with “wrongful death.” On the one hand, I know that there is divine plan and somehow, at some level of consciousness where my human brain doesn’t go, everything is part of that. I know with everything that’s in me that James is alive and thriving in a bigger, fuller life than is possible here, and so are those people who left this earth eight years ago today and in the aftermath of that day’s events. And yet as a human being, I rail against history: No one should die at sixteen, damn it, or by jumping out of a fiery skyscraper.

When we were moving last fall, I found a snapshot I took of William’s three children, Sian, Erik, and James. We were at Liberty Island and they were captured in this photo with the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in the background. As I stared at that picture, I tried to come to grips with how it could be that I was looking at a perfectly reasonable photograph of life as it should be—my husband’s three children, and two giant buildings with thousands of people working and meeting and dining inside—and still grasp that James is not here, and neither are so many of the people who were in those buildings the day I got that picture in the viewfinder and called out to those three kids: “Say please!”

I guess faith is called faith because it’s not all about knowing. I know that my flight will be late taking off. I know that I brought a seaweed-and-arugula salad to eat in the plane. I know that I have a journalism project deadline and should work on that, but that I also have a really good book with me and I’ll do more reading on this flight than writing. I don’t know about the rest of it, not with my human brain anyway. And yet there’s a part of me that does know that, somehow, there is great Love at the core of the universe. And for today, that’s enough.