I lived about a half hour’s walk from Ground Zero in 2001, but I might as well have been a million miles away. To claim any closer connection to 9/11 would be, in my opinion, a grievous insult to those who lost a loved one. The event happened in the city, but whose community was really affected? Not mine. The tragedy for so many families really played out in the metropolitan New York suburbs.

Well over half of those killed lived outside the city, a fact I hardly noticed at the time, because I was not yet a suburbanite. I am now, and with my new life, I think I can better grasp the magnitude of what people went through in those little towns, where the dads and moms didn’t arrive home that night on the evening train.

There was a good reason why the World Trade Center was one of those unloved buildings in New York; it’s because Manhattanites didn’t know many people who worked there. It was thought of as more of a commuters’ building, with a New Jersey Path rail station right underneath. The Trade Center seemed to me like a place where business was business, and the rest of life, family life, was conducted on the safer, greener, cleaner end of that train, back in the suburbs.  

I always sort of knew that 9/11 was not just an urban but also suburban catastrophe; I worked in news back then and was pretty well versed in the details of the victim list. But when I recently revisited CNN’s list, I was shocked at the scale of the devastation for the small suburbs:  two dozen killed in Middletown, New Jersey. Ten in Bellmore on Long Island. Eighteen in Basking Ridge, New Jersey (the Washington suburbs also suffered greatly, but because I don’t know that geography at all, I don’t feel comfortable naming specific towns.)

When I said that my community wasn’t affected by 9/11, I should have said that I didn’t have a community, at least one you could draw on a map.  My “community” when I was single and in the city was my workplace and the bars and restaurants that served steak past 11 p.m. after I got off work.

I’m not saying that my friends are somehow better now that I live in a small town with a family, but I do have more connections to more people. For every mom I get to know, even casually, I am then loosely connected to that entire family. I think of all the children my son befriends: I know that I’ll probably keep tabs on their fates and fortunes for the rest of their lives. And I’ve only been in my town for a year.

Out of the dozen moms I’ve gotten to know over that year, I can’t even fathom one or two of their husbands not coming home on September 11, or how that would affect our community. For those of my friends who’ve been here longer than I have, or who go to church or temple, the scope of the tragedy would be exponentially wider.  

It’s strange but I never thought to look up my own community until the tail-end of writing this piece, because I’m outside of Boston. But, of course, with two of the planes coming out of Boston, some of the suburbs here were hit by 9/11 as well.

Linda Keenan worked 7 years as a head writer/senior producer for various programs on CNN...read more

To my surprise, my town, which feels very small, lost four people, and I’d like to close with the names of the neighbors I never got to meet, three dads and one mom I’ll never run into at the playground: Patrick Quigley, Edmund Glazer, Neilie Anne Casey, John Cahill. To their families and all the others spread across the country and the world, my family will never forget your family’s loss.
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