After our friend left last night, we flicked on the TV and saw that Channel 4 were showing a 9/11 documentary, as is customary at this time of year, called 102 Minutes that Changed America. It has been some time since I have watched a 9/11 documentary all the way through and despite the (almost) 8 years that have passed since the tragedy, I still found the footage utterly harrowing. It was like watching the scariest horror film except I knew it was all true. The style of the documentary was very interesting – simply showing footage of all sorts from all sources – from camera crews from the press to people in their apartments, trapped and looking on in horror, utterly helpless.
I went to bed feeling terribly sad and as a result had the most awful nightmare that I was dying of cancer and had four hours left to live. The dream seemed to last all night and consisted of me saying my goodbyes to my loved ones. I suppose this was me facing my mortality after watching such a colossal loss of human life which is pretty understandable.
Oh my goodness!
9/11 is just around the corner again. Looks like it’s time to find all the documentaries and specials and get ready to cry.
I watched this too and also found it harrowing.
Even though I know it is a true story it still felt like a movie. I found the way they knitted the timeline together using fottage from all the different perspectives was brilliant and it gave a very honest and raw feel to the programme.
There was another programme on Monday that used the phone messages from those dialling out from the Towers to their loved ones to show you the story from inside. I was a wreck…….
There is something so catastrophic about 9/11 that makes it hard to imagine how horrific it must have been to be caught up in it.
I worked in Lloyd’s of London as an insurance broker – I started just after 9/11 and while I was queuing up to see an underwriter, I picked up a newsletter. There was an article about another insurance brokers, Marsh, which said they had lost 300-odd employees. My first thought was – oh dear, redundancies. Then I read it again and realised those people worked in WTC and they had died. It came very close to home then for me, even though I was really still very removed from the whole thing.