My So-Called Homeschool

(sticky post through 9-11, scroll down for newer posts)

I found the 2,996 website through a Blog Explosion member’s blog — I don’t even remember which one at this point — and thought, “What a great idea!”. 9-11 seems so long ago, so far away from Michigan, and yet everytime I read about that day, every History Channel special, every picture shown from the horror that day gives me a big lump in my throat. When I saw what Dale was trying to do, I figured what the heck, I can write one post for one person. I’m not a writer and have never claimed to be. I’m just a mom writing about another mom who should not be forgotten.

There isn’t much on the web about Molly. She was a single mom, an insurance broker, a friend, a neighborhood icon. She sounds like someone we all know or would love to know. She raised 4 boys to adulthood alone, with wit and humor (4 boys, she’d have to have a sense of humor!) Evidently, she had a signature throat-clearing sound that, from the living room, would wake even the most dead-to-the-world teenager. Her son Joseph is quoted by the New York Times as saying “She was very tough, but she was also gentle, and that captured it for me.” In one of the tribute sites, one of her son’s friends mentioned that he loved the way she mothered him along with her own — tough yet with humor, telling it ‘like it is’. These things so overshadow the details of her life’s tragic ending — she worked for Aon Corporation, and was in or at the World Trade Center, Tower 2 at the time of the attack.

She just sounds like an ordinary person — like you or me — just living life, raising her sons, trying to get them married off. I think this is the only way 9-11 doesn’t become just another event in history; we must take these lists of names and look them up, read about the people, and let them become real. This is the only way to prevent them from being forgotten. Thanks, Dale, for forcing me to do just that.

If you’d like to read about more of the 2,996 victims of September 11, 2006, you can find links to all of the 2996 posts here.