{"id":136,"date":"2011-09-10T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-10T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morningnewsinverse.com\/?p=136"},"modified":"2011-09-10T03:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-10T10:00:00","slug":"she-haunts-me-still-a-911-tribute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/?p=136","title":{"rendered":"SMALL MOMENTS \u2013 A 9\/11 TRIBUTE"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saturday, September 10, 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n

by Suzanne Watson<\/p>\n

Her message was my wake-up call.\u00a0 She inspired me and changed my life forever.\u00a0 And I never met her.<\/p>\n

Melissa Harrington Hughes died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t work there; she was on a business trip for her San Francisco-based technology firm. She was an extremely accomplished 31 year old, who had traveled the world and had recently married her sweetheart, Sean Hughes.<\/p>\n

Many people remember her, and him, for the harrowing telephone message that she left him minutes after the building was struck by the\u00a0plane.\u00a0 In that message, she said, \u201cSean, it\u2019s me. I just wanted to let you know I love you and I am stuck in this building in New York. A plane hit or a bomb went off \u2013 we don\u2019t know, but there\u2019s a lot of smoke and I just wanted you to know I loved you.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first time I heard Melissa\u2019s voicemail, Sean was being interviewed\u00a0by Chris Jansing\u00a0on MSNBC.\u00a0 Ms. Jansing\u00a0completely broke down upon hearing it.\u00a0 Clearly, Melissa\u2019s final words resonated with a lot of people.\u00a0 The internet site dedicated to Melissa filled with posts from people who were touched\u00a0by her story.\u00a0 I was among them. Somehow, with all of the\u00a0tragedy of that day, her story stuck with me above all of the others.\u00a0 But why?<\/p>\n

Partly, I think in some ways I could relate to her.\u00a0 I was working for a large financial institution at the time and had spent all of my life, and most of my career, working in San Francisco.\u00a0 One of my positions required that I visit our businesses in New York in the Trade Center, so I had also taken business trips to the towers.<\/p>\n

When the buildings collapsed I thought about all of the\u00a0people that\u00a0worked for my company.\u00a0 We lost three employees that day, but I didn\u2019t know any of them.\u00a0 She was the one that stood out for me.\u00a0 Her beautiful wedding picture taken up in Napa, close to where I grew up, became seared in my brain as it was shown repeatedly over the next several days.\u00a0 But it was more than the pictures; it was her message.<\/p>\n

In her voice I could sense\u00a0so many of her emotions: fear, panic, bewilderment.\u00a0 But mostly, in her final\u00a0minutes on earth, she wanted Sean to know that she loved him.\u00a0 I thought about her, and all of the\u00a0people that\u00a0died that day, who went off to work as they normally did.\u00a0 Kissing a spouse or child good-bye, grabbing a cup of coffee, making plans for the weekend.\u00a0 And none of them came home.\u00a0 Plans and hopes and dreams were gone in an instant.\u00a0 Sean Hughes said that he and Melissa were excited about their future and talked about all the things that newlyweds do: moving to a new home, getting a dog, having children.<\/p>\n

Her final\u00a0words to Sean started me thinking about my own life.\u00a0 My husband had taken early retirement in 1996.\u00a0 He wanted to travel, spend time with our new grandson, and enjoy time with friends.\u00a0 I had wanted to continue working.\u00a0 But I kept thinking about Melissa\u2019s message.\u00a0 What if that had been me?\u00a0 Is that how I would want my life to end, without ever having enjoyed what my husband and I had worked so hard to build?<\/p>\n

The weeks following September 11 were frightening and incredibly busy for me.\u00a0 My division of the company had locations throughout the United States and for weeks after the twin towers fell we received bomb threats in major cities. I had an office on the top floor of our Los Angeles headquarters and I jumped every time I\u00a0 heard a plane or helicopter go by.\u00a0 After a month or so, I began to feel like this would all pass and that life would get back to \u201cnormal\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 But then I thought about Melissa.\u00a0 Life doesn\u2019t get scripted.\u00a0 Although the odds of me being killed in a terrorist attack might be low, there were still no guarantees that I could escape a car accident or a terminal illness.<\/p>\n

So in the first week of November, when all of the\u00a0initial\u00a0frenzy had died down, I told my boss that I wanted to resign.\u00a0 We negotiated that I would stay until March 1, which I did.\u00a0 I have never regretted that decision and would not trade all of the memories and experiences I\u2019ve had since then for any amount of compensation I gave up.<\/p>\n

\n

Judith Viorst once wrote that it is the small moments in life that make it rich. \u00a0 Melissa made me realize that I needed to grab the small moments while I could; that sitting with my husband every morning, sipping coffee and watching the news, is a gift.<\/p>\n

So to Melissa Harrington Hughes: thank you.\u00a0 Someday I hope to get back to the new trade center memorial where I can touch the steel engraving of your name.\u00a0 And in the hollows of those letters, we will finally be connected.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Saturday, September 10, 2011 by Suzanne Watson Her message was my wake-up call.\u00a0 She inspired me and changed my life forever.\u00a0 And I never met her. Melissa Harrington Hughes died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.\u00a0 She … read more<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[12,449,625,641,741],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-holiday-observations","tag-12","tag-melissa-harrington-hughes","tag-san-francisco","tag-september-11","tag-twin-towers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p31aN0-2c","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromabirdseyeview.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}