Gratitude Monday: A lesson from the ruins

This weekend was full of the annual “Never Forget” reminders of the 9/11 attacks. You couldn’t escape them, and nor (I suppose) should you.

I personally try to distance myself from the nightmare images of continuous loops of the second plane flying into the World Trade Center, viewed on a bank of monitors across a full wall at the office in Maidenhead. Or of driving home to London on the M4 the next afternoon and seeing GSK’s headquarters flags flown at half-staff, which sent me into uncontrollable sobbing.

I do not compare my grief to anyone else’s—certainly not to that of people who woke up that morning with intact families and friendships, and went to bed with great gaping, multi-story, jet-fueled, ash-covered holes torn through them.

But here’s what I also will never forget: the friends and colleagues across Europe who called and texted me for days, to check on me, to cheer me and to show their concern for me.

A sheet of A-4 paper with a hand-lettered message taped to the elevator wall at a hotel in Florence expressing condolences to any Americans who might be staying there for the appalling wounds we’d suffered. And signatures in different inks periodically added in solidarity.

The people—familiar and unknown alike—who insisted that I (and we) did not stand alone. The ones who’ve been here all along, even when I didn’t notice them, or was sure they didn’t even exist.

It seems odd that it takes the worst possible thing to make you realize this truth, and sometimes even then it escapes you. (Well, maybe not you. But me.)

But I’m profoundly grateful for all of them who not only feel the caring but also express it. Doesn’t really matter how large or small the gesture, how eloquent or inarticulate the communication; it’s the act itself that makes all the difference. As I well know.