Sunday morning, Anne Kauth, the Saratoga Springs teacher whose husband, Don, died in the World Trade Center attacks, is scheduled to be at ground zero for the 10th anniversary 9/11 observances.
“I guess it’s time,” she said to me the other day.
Her youngest child, Cecelia, now 25, is completing a cross-country bike ride in memory of her father. The ride raised some $25,000, which will provide bicycles for a whole village in Africa.
“I’m very proud of her,” Kauth said. “She’s been through a lot.”
She was quick to add that she’s proud of all of her children. Kathleen, the Olympic ice hockey player, was in the limelight a lot over the years.
Sunday afternoon, family and friends of Don and Anne are scheduled to join up at a get-together being put on by Don’s firm at the zoo in Central Park. I am hoping that we’ll be able to connect at least through texts during the day.
I feel kind of creepy asking to let The Saratogian intrude on so personal and heart-wrenching a day. She understands this is my job and graciously shares her cell phone number, with the warning that she’s not the greatest at texting.
I cannot imagine having lived through so terrible and public a loss as that experienced by the Kauths and thousands of families like them, or by people like Leslie Miller, whose son Taylor gave his life in the fighting since 9/11.
I remember the morning of 9/11 I was getting ready for work and my husband told me a plane hit the World Trade Center. I turned on the 13-inch TV in our bedroom in time to see the second plane hit the tower. The rest of the day in the office, everyone glued to the TV, was a blur of horror and the adrenalin rush of publishing the biggest news of my lifetime.
Ten years? Can it really be 10 years?
A wonderful, original and moving novel is “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” the story of a precocious New York City boy’s quest following his father’s death in 9/11. It reminds me that it is too easy to mistakenly underestimate the long-term effects of an event on someone, especially a child.
Like Cece Kauth.
I just finished previewing many of the stories being published in special edition that will be the front of The Saratogian’s Sunday, Sept. 11, 2011 edition. It’s not easy to look at some of the images from the Associated Press. It’s hard to read some of the stories without choking up. Editor Paul Tackett has designed a dramatic package of local stories, many of them written by reporters who were barely in high school, if that, on the day of the attacks. Interviewing people who suffered a loss in 9/11, and having responders recount their stories, has been education for them, I think. That’s a good thing.
What we can’t remember, we need to learn. We need to be reminded, touched, and humbled, and, in the process, inspired to go on.