ABSTRACT
For most Americans, September 11, 2001, is forever stamped into memory. When the terrorist attacks began, the author was on a plane traveling from Tampa to Dulles Airport to assist her elderly mother, who, unable to care for herself, was in a nursing home in Luray, Virginia. The author tells a story of what it felt like to live through that day and its aftermath, concentrating on details of how she made sense of and negotiated her way through the confusing haze of the first twenty-four hours after the terrorist attacks. The story is a chaos narrative, but as with all chaos narratives, it is harnessed and ordered, pushing chaos into the background so that a linear coherent plot can unfold and be featured. The author provided her story as an incentive for others to put their stories into words, compare their experiences to mine, and find companionship in their sorrow.
