It was just a day in September.

I had worked all night, and come home to find that my wife had the day off, for some reason. She took our daughter to daycare down the block, and we chatted. We had been married for about three and a half years, and were comfortable and familiar, but still, this was a nice day when she was home. I stayed up and might have even had a late cup of coffee, well into the mid morning. It was nice.
We stepped out onto the front porch of the apartment, noticing the less-hot, but still sticky air. Our apartment manager Mac, from next door, told us that he reckoned that we had heard the news. Strangely, I hadn't. I normally would have killed an hour on the internet on my desktop computer (internet on cell phones was in its infancy, and anyway, we didn't have a cell phone), or listening to the radio, but this morning, because my wife was home, I had just enjoyed her company.

So I turned on the television, and we saw the news, and the re-recitation of it for about 3 iterations of the cycle. And the phone rang, and it was my best friend, who told me that we HAD to nuke the Muslims who did this.

I really don't remember what my wife did or said, the rest of the day.

I got to bed at around 1:30 or 2:00 that afternoon (5 hours late), slept poorly, and got up around 7:00pm to hear our President declare that they had identified the group that had attacked our country, and that we would go after them.  I then got ready and showed up early for work for another midnight shift.

17 years later, it suddenly occurs to me that one of the many, MANY casualties of that attack was my lovely day with my wife.

It's nothing, I know. But we didn't have a lot of weekday mornings together, then or now.

I feel ashamed for even thinking about it. People lost their lives, and their families. We lost a little part of our country.

Tell your loved ones how you feel about them. You don't have very many chances to do so. You might even lose the next chance that you think that you'll have.