Remembering 9/11 for yourself; interpreting it for your children

When the planes crashed into the towers, it had been six days since Paula Tilley had given birth.

She was on maternity leave — “in mommy mode” — at her home in Vernon, N.J., about an hour from New York City.

Her 7-year-old daughter was at school, and as Tilley learned more about the terrorist attacks, she wondered if she should pick her up.

She called the school and learned it was on lockdown — blinds drawn, doors shut.

Her friend came over. They watched TV. She fed her newborn.

She talked to her soon-to-be brother-in-law, who had to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to get out of the city. Then, they lost cellphone service.

Tilley, who’s lived on Hilton Head Island for the past decade, cried and prayed that day as millions of Americans did.

Sept. 11, 2001, was “surreal,” she said Friday morning.

But the real trauma began after the attacks and lasted for months as smoke continued to rise from the rubble.

An eerie vibe

When the planes crashed into the towers, Michael Bizzoco’s teachers were on strike.

With limited staff to supervise the 500 or so Archbishop Stepinac High School students, the kids were sequestered in the auditorium.

So they sat, just hanging out, trying not to get in trouble.

The headmaster entered the room.

“I vaguely remember them saying that it was actual jets, airliners,” Bizzoco, now a Beaufort resident, said Wednesday. “(That) it was deliberate. There were no TVs in there, so we didn’t know what the extent of the damage was.”

Staffers came and went, called his classmates’ names. They had parents who worked in the city.

The coming and going of the staffers and the emptying auditorium created an “eerie” vibe.

Around him, conversation.

“ ‘Are we going to war?’ ”

“ ‘Are we getting drafted?’ ”

Bizzoco already knew the answers to those questions, at least as they pertained to him.

He’d soon leave White Plains, N.Y., and fly to Beaufort, S.C., where Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island awaited.

Smoke and memories

“The newspapers were running stories about how to prepare for emergencies and what could happen next,” Tilley said, remembering the weeks after 9/11.

“I remember reading the papers, and they said to stock up on all these supplies.”

Medicine.

Cash. (The ATMs were out of order.)

Gasoline. (To this day, she doesn’t let her tank run low.)

Plastic sheeting. (To cover windows in the event of a chemical attack.)

Three weeks after 9/11, her soon-to-be brother-in-law married into the family. The wedding was on Long Island. She took the Throgs Neck Bridge to get there.

“I remember driving over the bridge, and I could still see the smoke pouring out of lower Manhattan,” she said. “It was pretty unnerving.”

And it was unnerving when she was in Walmart some time later. A plane flew over the store and everyone on her aisle ducked.

And later still when she was at a hockey game at the Meadowlands and worried what she would do if there was an attack.

And when she finished with maternity leave in March 2002, when she resumed her commute toward the city that led her out of the mountains along winding, two-lane roads, along which memorials would pop up.

And stay up.

“I remember coming around this corner, and sharp turn, a big memorial, a large cross, artificial flowers, maybe a picture on it, and you’re not gonna stop, but I remember seeing it and crying as I passed it,” she said.

Her daughter, a Girl Scout, made American flag pins out of safety pins and beads. The troop sold them, and gave the money to the Red Cross.

‘Nothing but wartime’

“There was an air in the house,” Bizzoco said. “Like, ‘This probably isn’t going to be solved overnight, and it’s probably going to affect our family.’ ”

“I came from a military family, so my dad knew.”

Bizzoco arrived on Parris Island on Sept. 17, 2002.

By December, he was a Marine.

Three months later, at Fort Sill, Okla., he watched the invasion of Iraq on TV. Night-vision pictures. Flashes from airstrikes.

“I remember thinking, ‘This is it, we’re going. We’re artillery. ... We’re going to go, and we’re going to take care of business.’ ”

He eventually deployed to Iraq.

“But I feel like everything I did after (9/11), overseas, was in some way ... connected to (9/11),” he said.

“Like, in my unit, when we deployed, we only had three combat veterans. ... But later, you start to see privates and lance corporals with stacks (of ribbons and medals) on their chests that were bigger than some of the gunnery sergeants,’ because (the privates and corporals) came up in a Marine Corps that was nothing but wartime.”

A few years later, he’d have a child.

Detached yet connected

Today, Bizzoco, a police officer in Beaufort County, has a 1-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son.

His son asks about the black metal bracelet he wears, the one in remembrance of his friend, Gunnery Sgt. Thomas Sullivan, who was killed in July 2015’s terrorist attack in Chattanooga, Tenn.

“I just want (my son) to understand,” Bizzoco said. “I think it hit him more — what happened in 2015. That hit him hard, really hard, and that was kind of difficult to explain. Because he saw how emotional dad got.”

That understanding is a conversation — whether it’s about Sullivan’s death or Bizzoco’s time in Iraq — that always loops back to 9/11, when Bizzoco was a teenager in an auditorium who’d already decided to join the Corps, even before the planes crashed into the towers.

And today, Tilley’s son is 15, and even though he lived through 9/11, he feels detached from it.

Mother and son talked Thursday night, Tilley said. He said he feels removed from it, like it’s a part of history — the same thing his mother feels reading about World War II in a book.

“Although,” Tilley said, “he said, ‘Yeah, we’ve been at war since I was born.’

“And that’s all he’s known.”

She remembered talking to her daughter in the aftermath of the attacks, just giving her the bare facts, not offering more than that.

Not wanting to have to talk to her about such things.

But knowing that her daughter not knowing about what happened would be worse.

This story was originally published September 10, 2016 at 12:00 PM with the headline "Remembering 9/11 for yourself; interpreting it for your children."