I haven't enough heart, or enough money, or enough blood in my veins, for all the anguish I feel for all the people affected by the recent attacks on our country and our people. I have given of myself what I could without a second thought. But I harbor a secret: I am selfish. Amidst all the grief others are feeling, I have my own secret suffering of which this is the first I've spoken. It is first and foremost in my heart; it is the tie that binds me to all human loss. I can not share in the little relief others have felt. Instead I scour the lists of victims for the name of a 7-year-old little girl, a name I don't even know completely, and a little girl I don't know at all. But her existence is the only evidence of the miraculous I have ever borne witness to. She is my daughter. She does not live with me. I entrusted her to the hands of strangers seven long years ago. I am trying to convince myself that they will keep her safe, as I have succeeded in doing in the past when doubt has cast its long and dark shadow on me. I haven't yet succeeded this time. Whoever says terror is icy is wrong. Terror is a hot, wet thing that envelops you in a smothering embrace, stealing the very air from your lungs and the spit from your mouth.

There are those who would deny me my motherhood, but if they could take a peek inside of me, go through this dark looking glass into my world, they would see that I wait and worry and search with a mother's frantic mind and sickened heart.

I tell myself she must be fine. What are the odds? What are the odds that this little girl from Florida would have been one of the, though many, relatively few killed? Then a sinister voice whispers with the hot breath of hell into my ear, what were the odds on September 10th that this would have happened at all? But I still search for that name, and I simply hope that I continue to do so in vain.

© 2001 (c) Shannon Lewis