Ten years ago I was a sixth-grade teacher at a school in suburban Maryland, just a few miles from Washington, D.C. It was only the second week of school during my second year of teaching. That year I taught twin eleven-year-old boys whom I barely knew. In the morning after the towers had fallen and the Pentagon had been hit by a plane, we knew that the twins' father, whom I had never met, was supposed to fly out of Dulles that day for a business trip, but we didn't have any news of his whereabouts for several hours. Then, later that afternoon, the principal came to my door to get one of the boys from my classroom. I felt my face go white. I knew without being told the worst had happened. I kept teaching. When class was finally over, I learned that the boys' father had in fact been on American Airlines Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon.

Later that same year, while we were studying a young reader's version of Homer's Odyssey, something happened in class that I've never forgotten. In the story, Odysseus was fighting obstacle after obstacle on his way home to Ithaca and his wife Penelope, who had spent most of her husband's absence fighting off suitors. Instead of responding to the suitors' advances, Penelope wove her tapestry while she waited faithfully for husband to arrive home. One of the twins quietly asked, supposedly of Penelope, "Will she remarry?" I sensed that the real question he was asking was if his own mother would remarry. I simply said, "We'll have to see."

Ten years later I return to that crystal-blue September morning. Quiet now is the chaos of that day, and what resonates is that simple question, posed by a young boy, of what will happen next. Much has been written and said and done in the intervening years following the attacks, but to me the most powerful memory is that small moment.

This Sunday, we honor the tenth anniversary of September 11. How each of us remembers that day is an individual choice. As one friend suggested on a Facebook posting, "what if we honored the dead by doing things that affirm life and liberty, as each of us sees fit?"

Mark Elberfeld

Communications Coordinator