It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

Today, we have an extra special treat for you all.  As a Posse Scholar, we are blessed to be a part of a community of leaders, entrepreneurs, educators and other great movers and shakers that make up the Posse (alumni) network.  However, all over the country and wherever there are Posse scholars to be found, there is also a group of unsung helpers (or tree-house night elves if so you please) that keep us scholars sane during our four years on campus; I’m talking about our Posse Plussers.

Today we are fortunate enough to have one of our Middlebury Plusser share her 9/11 story with us.  We hope that her courageous story will resonate with you as it had with us.

Stay safe, stay strong,
From all of us over at the Posse at Middlebury Blog

From Melissa Hirsch (Class of 2011)

“I live in New York State, a one-hour drive from La Guardia and JFK airports. My grandparents had been staying with us for about a week, and were supposed to fly home sometime in the late morning on September 11, 2001. My dad was reading the newspaper on the porch when I walked in from the bus stop that afternoon. My mom sat next to him. My dad folded the newspaper into his lap and asked me if I knew what had happened. I said not really. I said I’d heard that there was a fire in New York City, that some other students had heard about an accident, and that one of my friends said she’d heard about an accident, too, but that it didn’t sound like an “accident” to her. When my dad explained to me that the twin towers were gone, I nodded as if I understood, and walked inside. I turned on the tv. The news was on every channel. They were interviewing New Yorkers on every channel. They flashed pictures of flames and smoke clouds, they read the names of every person who died on the planes, they asked onlookers to tell what they saw and, through tears, one man tried. He looked at the sky. “The building came down.” The words caught in his throat. “They jumped from the windows.” I turned off the tv and went back outside and asked where my grandparents were. I was told that they were inside, that their flight had been canceled, and that they would fly home tomorrow.

That night I went into their room in tears, and I cried and I begged them not to fly tomorrow. I wanted them to stay with me and to be safe and they could not fly the next day because it was not safe and because I was scared that something would happen and make everything even worse. My grandpa said nothing and did not look at me. My grandma looked directly at my eyes. She said, “If I can fly tomorrow, I will fly tomorrow. We do not live our lives in fear of what might happen. Not if we truly want to live.”

I did not stop crying, and I still did not want them to leave.

They didn’t fly the next day- the airports shut down for about a week after the attacks, the way I remember it- but my grandmother would have, and that is the point. I found out a few years later that she had once disobeyed a man who threatened her with a loaded machine gun. She and my grandfather were having dinner with my cousins when three men with guns broke into the house. My grandpa started shaking, and she moved to tend to him as one of the robbers grasped his gun and demanded that she stay where she was. She didn’t even glance at the man who bullied her, all she said was, “My husband needs me,” and marched right through the room to protect the one she loved.

I can hear her thoughts in that moment. What does my life matter if I have protected the one I love? The men with the guns did not take her down. And if she would not let them, she sure as hell wasn’t going to let some fearful terrorists stop her- or her family, or her country- from living.

My grandmother told me that fear was at the root of the attacks, that it fueled the planes more than gasoline, that once you stripped away the burning buildings, the rubble, the plastic knives that scratched the pilots’ throats, and the word “terrorist,” you were left with fearful people who wanted someone else to own that fear, that “terror,” instead. But if we could carry on, they could not take us down. For that reason, my grandmother would have flown on September 12th. And in that way we have triumphed since.”