There are a million stories. This is one.

The day was very much like today. The air crisp, the sky a brilliant blue, and the water sparkling and bright.

I boarded the ferry from Rowes Wharf to the airport. I was meeting two colleagues for dinner at one of the airport hotels.

We greeted each other warmly. These were difficult times for our business, and we felt a kinship that can come when facing a tough struggle together. The dinner was a nice respite. The following day we would be flying to Los Angeles.

“You’ll have to come over to the house for dinner. Meet my wife. We’ll throw some salmon on the grill,” said Andrew who ran business development.

“Change your flight,” said the CEO, “Fly out with us.”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “it’s too much hassle.”

I had bypassed corporate travel and made my own reservations. The company’s preferred airline was American, but I wanted to fly United because of all the perks I had accumulated at a previous job. When I saw the cost of a direct flight, I elected to fly through Chicago and save the company a couple hundred dollars.

And so it was the next day that three would board their flights. One would land and two would not.

“What place is this? Where are we now?” – Carl Sandburg, Grass

Airline travel has a certain rhythm. That rhythm was interrupted when my flight landed in Chicago. The plane arrived and then nothing. No announcements from the pilot, no stewardesses walking the aisles, no “Please keep your seatbelt fastened. . . ” Nothing.

Looking out the window I noticed a lot of planes. They were everywhere, at the gates, on the runways. None were moving.

Finally, an announcement, a strange announcement. The pilot gave permission to use our cell phones. And the confusion began.

“A bomb went off in New York.”

“A plane crashed.”

“A plane crashed into New York.”

The man next to me continued to read his newspaper.

I checked my phone and got a message from my office. I spoke to Brien. He asked, “What flight were they on?”

“They were on American. The first flight out.”

“That was the plane.  They must have been on that plane,” Brien said.

I sat there in my plane seat with confusion reigning and thought — that can’t be. That’s impossible. American has a lot of airplanes. I refused to believe.

Then I called my wife. Redial, redial, redial. The networks were jammed. We eventually speak. She didn’t know I was flying through Chicago.

The planes had been grounded. The airport was closed. A reservation had been made at a hotel outside Chicago. “It is not safe to be in a city right now,” my wife said.

We got off the plane. Passing into the terminal was like submerging your head in water. Eerily quiet and alone. I took a cab to the hotel.

The hotel was large and empty. Sitting in the vacant bar area, which was closed, I looked up and saw a man walk by. I knew him.

“George!”

“Frank!”

“What are you doing here?” And we talked. George was going to go into town, get a room at a hotel there.

“I’m leaving. Heading back to Boston tomorrow,”he said.

“Sure you are George.” He left.

An unrelenting sense of grief began to condense on me. And with nowhere to go, and nothing to do, I went to my room and broke down. I was alive and they were not.

The next day I followed George’s example. I got a room in town and walked down Michigan Avenue. There were SWAT officers stationed at the Sears Tower. They would not let anyone inside. I did not understand what they were doing there. I was disappointed. I thought it would be fun to go to the top, kill some time. That’s how clearly I was thinking.

Then I got a call from my company. The airports were still closed. The train stations were closed; but they had a car for me. I called George.

“Want to drive back to Boston with me?”

Waiting for George at the Hertz counter, two college students, hearing I was going to Boston, asked if they could come too.

“Of course.”

We drove back to Boston in a torrential rain. At one point one of the college boys was behind the wheel. It was pitch black, late, and the weather was horrific. Tractor trailer trucks were everywhere. He was driving very fast, 85 MPH or so. I turned to him and said, “If you get us in an accident, my wife will kill you.”

We dropped George at his house. The boys got out at Alewife station, and I went home.

I met my wife, took a shower, and went to work.

“Be grateful. It’s as simple as that.” – Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

The only living thing to survive the blast at Hiroshima was a ginkgo tree. Ginkgo trees are prehistoric. They can live to be 3,000 years old. We planted one in our yard.

Every year we pick 5 leaves. One for Andrew, one for Jeffrey, one for a family friend’s brother-in-law, one for the woman who stopped to speak at a pond in Truro, and one for everybody else. We drop them in the ocean.

The sense of loss is a ghost that will haunt us always. The knowledge that there are others for whom the loss is greater, the suffering is greater, and the sorrow is greater only feeds the grief.

Be grateful. Live accordingly.