Remembering that tragic day 10 years ago...

It was Monday night Sept. 10, 2001. I was playing darts in my dart league and I received a phone call that my father's health had made a radical turn for the worse and that he wasn't expected to live very long.

I knew he was ill, but wasn't expecting to get this call so late that evening. My sister was already with our father, a man I hadn't spoken to in 25 years. I thought about it and made the decision to book a flight for early the next morning on Sept. 11, 2001 from Yuma to Los Angeles and ultimately to New York's Kennedy Airport.

There were five family members on four plans heading to New York City the morning of 9/11: my niece on the red-eye from San Francisco, my mother and her grandson, my brother-in-law and myself.

I left Yuma early, early on Sept. 11, 2001 and while in the air, the first plane hit the Twin Towers. I remember landing at LAX and that it only took us around 45 minutes to get there when it normally takes around one hour. Back then, United Airlines had an offsite terminal at LAX where you got onto a bus to take you to the main terminal.

Cell phones were in use, but not like they are now. But at least two people on the bus to the main terminal were already on their phone. I was already emotional about flying to NYC and seeing this man after 25 years and I was very sleep deprived and I couldn't understand what could be so important that they had to be on the phone so early in the morning.

No one said anything until we walked into the terminal from the tarmac and then my cell phone rang. It was my husband telling me that New York was attacked and I wasn't going to get to NYC (at the same time they were telling us that LAX was going to be evacuated). My husband just said get out of the airport, get a bus and get to a car rental agency and get a car and drive home; I wasn't going to New York.

I was one of the first to get to Enterprise Rental. I remember crying at the counter, realizing I wasn't going to make it to New York but knowing that now I had to get back to Yuma. Enterprise was great and I was one of the first to get a car and I drove home. It was then that I listened to the world changing before our eyes, and for me, my ears.

I cried the entire time because I didn't know if my family members made it.

I do remember that in the toll booths in Orange County, everyone was so nice and said God Bless you. We all were in pain that day. My mother and nephew landed 45 minutes before the first plane hit, my niece also landed beforehand, yet my brother-in-law was diverted first to Boston (then with the terrorists coming from Boston, they diverted them to Rhode Island). They were all safe.

I still have the paper ticket from that terrible day: LAX to NYC on Sept. 11, 2001. My father died three weeks later. My family said their peace to my father; I said my own peace.

I never made it back to New York until June 2005. I would have dreams about seeing the skyline without the towers. I'm a New Yorker and was born and raised 35 miles east of NYC. I have a photo taken from my second-grade trip to the Statue of Liberty from the ferry before the Twin Towers were built. Seeing that same site nearly 40 years later without the towers was ominous!

In 2010 I took my son to ground zero and we walked around and went into St. Paul's church, a church of refuge that terrible day. I never cried my first trip to ground zero, but this trip was different. I walked among the collections from that terrible day looking at the vignettes on a somber Good Friday with the beautiful chamber music playing. When my son pointed out a laminated full page from a daily newspaper about a woman's husband lost in the towers on 9/11, I realized it was from the Yuma Sun, my newspaper there amongst the hundreds of special memories from that day.

That day I finally cried again like I did on Sept. 11, 2001. But that day 10 years ago, we all cried.

After 9/11 I went to my son's book fair at Rolle Elementary School. There was a book I bought for him called “Sept. 12, 2001.” I thought it was so important because we will never have to relive that day again and the following day, the healing began. The healing is still taking place but more so for all those family members who lost a loved one that terrible day in September 2001.

Cynthia Marshall lives and works in Yuma.