Kind Like Katey

Every year on September 11, I think about where I was when the world seemed to stop.

I was almost eight months pregnant with Dylan.

That morning, Katey came into my room.

“OMG, April. You have to see this.”

I remember turning on the TV and trying to understand what I was looking at.

It didn’t seem real.

One of the towers had already been hit, and I remember seeing a plane hit on live television. I believe it was the second plane hitting the South Tower, but after twenty-five years, some of those details have blurred together.

What hasn’t blurred is the feeling.

The shock.

The fear.

The realization that this wasn’t an accident and that we were watching something horrible happen in real time.

I’ve always been an emotional person.

Almost eight-months-pregnant April was on a whole different level.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the people in those buildings. The people on the planes. Their husbands and wives. Their moms and dads. Their children.

People were going to work that morning. People were getting on airplanes. Families were going through their normal routines.

And suddenly everything changed.

At some point that day, Katey and I went to Walmart.

I honestly don’t remember exactly why we decided to go. Maybe I needed to get out of the house. Maybe I needed a break from watching the television.

Or maybe I just needed to hear something good.

Because while we were watching so much loss unfold, there was this little life growing inside of me.

My baby.

And for whatever reason, I needed to hear him.

At Walmart, we bought one of those at-home baby heartbeat monitors. I can still picture it.

It was baby blue.

It’s funny what your brain decides to keep. I can’t tell you exactly why we went to Walmart that day, but I can remember the color of that little machine.

We brought it home and listened.

It sounded so strange.

I had expected this obvious little thump-thump, thump-thump.

Instead, it sounded like being underwater.

There was swishing and sloshing, almost like waves moving around. All these strange muffled noises coming from this little world inside of me.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it was a heartbeat.

Dylan.

My baby was in there.

Alive.

Growing.

Completely unaware of what was happening in the world he would be born into just a couple of months later.

I don’t remember how long Katey and I listened.

I don’t remember what we said.

I just remember that sound.

And today, twenty-five years later, I realize there is another reason that memory means so much to me.

Katey was there.

She was the one who came into my room that morning and told me I needed to turn on the television.

She was beside me as we watched something neither of us could comprehend.

She went to Walmart with me.

And she was there when I listened to my son’s heartbeat.

September 11 will always belong first to the thousands of people who lost their lives that day and to the families who had to live every September 11 afterward without someone they loved.

But tucked quietly inside my own memory of that horrible day is one little moment that belongs to me.

Two sisters.

One baby-blue heartbeat monitor.

And one little boy, still safely tucked inside his mama, making the strangest underwater noises while we searched for the sound we needed to hear.

A heartbeat.

Twenty-five years later, Dylan is grown.

And Katey is gone.

That sentence alone knocks the wind out of me a little.

Because when I think back to that room, I realize I had them both with me.

My sister beside me.

My son inside me.

I couldn’t have possibly known how much I would someday treasure something as ordinary as sitting with my sister and listening to my baby.

If I could go back to that moment for just a minute, I don’t think I’d say anything.

I’d just sit there.

Katey beside me.

Dylan safe inside me.

And that tiny heartbeat filling the room.

I didn’t know how precious that moment was then.

I do now.