A personal 9/11 story, 25 years later

Cindy Adams, the circulation manager for Wiggins Memorial Library, shared her personal Sept. 11, 2001, experience for the 25th anniversary of the attacks. Adams' sister worked inside one of the World Trade Center towers when it was attacked that day, and while she survived the attack, the event would impact her health years later.

I am a born-and-raised New Yorker who, on Sept. 11, 2001, lived in Houston. That morning, I was in line at the Starbucks across the street from my job as a specialist copywriter at the Houston Chronicle. I noticed some commotion on the TV screen near the line, and wondered what it was about. By the time I got upstairs to my desk, my colleagues in the Marketing department were gathering in the conference room, watching the drama unfold.

I just kept thinking, and saying, "That's my city! That's my city."

I was so angry, incredulous.

I thought I knew that my sister, Robin Fox, worked near the World Trade Center; of course I fervently hoped she was OK, and of course couldn't get through to her. It was a few minutes later that I reached my mother in Newton Grove, who corrected me that no, indeed, Robin worked IN the World Trade Center.

I couldn't believe I had gotten that wrong. It suddenly became so much more real. I was shaken to the core.

A colleague drove me home to the apartment complex where I lived and where my brother and his family lived. I stopped at their apartment to inform him and my sister-in-law; she worked for Continental Airlines at the time and had been sent home. I waited out the day at my own apartment, glued to the TV (and for days afterward), unable to reach Robin or her husband, Billy. A construction electrician working on a site near Wall Street, he watched the whole tragedy unfold, heart in hand to put it mildly, from the rooftop of the site.

To make a long story short, we were among the "lucky" ones … at 4 p.m., my sister was able to call me and let me know she had made it out, down 53 flights of stairs in the South Tower, the second one hit and the first to fall. This with a plate in her "bad" ankle, having broken it the year before.

Unbelievable relief.

A miracle.

She had felt the building rock and was walking away, had gotten around the corner and about two blocks when the building fell and the cloud of dust enveloped the scene. Miraculously, she found a working phone, was able to reach Billy and meet up with him, and after about three hours, still miraculously, they were able to take a subway home to Queens.

My family continues to consider the parish priest (now an auxilliary bishop in Atlanta) who waited it out with my mom that day a true saint.

Sadly, my sister died a dozen years later from metastatic breast cancer, which both Billy and Mom thought might have been a result of the toxins of 9/11. Some of his co-workers have gotten sick from it.

It's difficult to fathom that was 25 years ago. God bless all those lost and those who mourn them - and the world.

- Cindy Adams