Yesterday

[fimbrethil]

Each 9/11 is different for us. This year was hard all around. For some reason, this one hit Bree and I harder than last year did. For a week leading up to it we both had hard emotional days. I found myself having WTC nightmares again and even had a couple of anxiety attacks. Bree went off with her boyfriend this year and saw a comedy show in the

Comments

[kshandra]

Thank you for sharing your day here.

I spent my day wanting to apologize to you. I said several thoughtless things to you and to others about your grief process early on. The only one who gets to decide how long it takes is you, and I was utterly wrong to think or suggest otherwise. I am deeply sorry to have caused you more hurt.

[fimbrethil]

Grief follows its own course, it is not a decision on the part of the griever how long it will take or what direction it will go. It is not my decision to hurt this much 14 years later. If grief has a GPS, it plays silly buggers with us all the time. Grief is not linear and does not give the griever a choice. It just is and we, the grievers, are forced to follow where it leads us.

[kshandra]

...and in attempting to make amends, all I've done is stick my foot further into my mouth. I should have simply apologized and left it at that.

[fimbrethil]

You should have just left it alone because I forgot about the whole incident a long time ago and moved on. Forgetting is easy, forgiving is not.

[fimbrethil]

I really should have sat on my hands for 24 hours before responding to your first comment. I know what it is like to need to apologize to someone over something that happened years ago and feeling very scared and vulnerable about reaching out because I feared rejection. Perhaps that is how you felt reaching out to me. I have been lucky enough to have some people respond favorably to my overtures and some not so much but, for me, it was always about the doing rather than the outcome. So perhaps you were right to reach out, after all this time, because while I forgot it and moved on, maybe you couldn't without saying something to me. I can accept that as a valid reason to want to make amends

[kshandra]

Scared and vulnerable was precisely where I was, and where I've been since I left my first comment. I waited, too, before saying anything, out of fear that it would be unwelcome. And when I did ultimately decide to speak up, I did so with the understanding that making the apology did not come with a guarantee that it would be accepted. So thank you for doing so.

Onward.