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United 93 and Our "Survivors Guilt"

One year during Easter break, I learned a valuable lesson about how long fear and guilt can stain a man and his soul. Every year during Easter, my cousins and I would go to my Grandparents house in San Simeon for the break in the school year. My cousins and I were practically the only kids in the area as it was a very small coastal town, populated almost exclusively by retirees like my grandparents. It was a great time to spend with my cousins and my grandparents. Rock hunting along the shore or rabbit hunting in the hills, it was a great place to be a kid and the company we shared was as good as it gets. My grandfather was a walking encyclopedia. Every rock had a story, every plant a potential use. Glass floats found on the beach were given a sense of reality as he told us how they were made and where they came from and how long they had probably been floating before we found them. “The chief” is what my dad and uncles called him, but he was always just “granddad” to us kids. He was a hero in the world during a time and in a culture that was without the virtue of heroes.

One day I came back from the beach and came into the house, I slammed the screen door behind me. My grandfather was asleep on the sofa in "mid afternoon nap", but when the bang of the screen door reverberated through the house he leapt up off the sofa exactly the way that 70 year old men don’t and electrified cats often do.

I will never forget the look of stark terror that was on his face, and although he was looking right at me, it was as if I wasn’t there. In just one moment he had gone from snoring and sleeping away the afternoon on the sofa to standing in a cold sweat, looking confused and terrified.