On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I reached out to a former Wall Street lawyer, a novelist, and a combat medic veteran, among others, for their thoughts on how that day changed their lives.
An hour or so later, I remember talking to a woman in her fifties, covered in soot, who told me in a calm, unemotional voice, like she was telling me what she had for lunch, how she had been leaving the tower with her best friend who had been hit by debris and killed. The woman was wiping at her jacket with napkins and said, "And now I don’t know how I’m ever going to get this jacket clean." She kept wiping and wiping.