My whole country is sad today and so am I.  Mine is not just the empathetic sadness I feel for our nation, for those families who lost family in the attacks, but a gut-wrenching irony of my own.  For September 11th is the very day (a Saturday in 1982) that I was given my second child and first son…if only for a while.  Bittersweet to the millionth power sizes up my frame of mind at the very mention of 9-11.

I sit on the ground on this anniversary between my mother and my son.  I try to feel where life flowed through me and where l am in this place—the only life between the generation that preceded me and the generation that expected to bury me.

Instead, I was entrusted with laying them both to rest.

Lilly Kauffman