9/11- An Anniversary Of The Day We Lost Our Innocence

And the day I lost a friend

The picture above is a tattoo on the inside of my left arm. It honors my friend, Tim Haviland. He was a close friend from college working at Marsh & McLennan on the 96th floor of 1 World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Tim kissed his wife, Amy, and his two stepsons goodbye and went off to work on a blue-sky Tuesday morning, just like many others who worked in Manhattan. Unfortunately, he had no way of knowing that he had hours to live and would never see his family again.

I met Tim when we were both freshmen at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. He was a gangly, wild-eyed kid from Iowa with bushy hair, a sharp tongue, and a keen intellect. He knew quite a lot about quite a lot. He also wasn’t afraid to make you aware of that, but he wasn’t obnoxious about it. I immediately liked Tim because we could talk about incredibly arcane topics for hours, which for me, a kid from the sticks of northern Minnesota, was incredibly stimulating. In addition, Tim was smart, curious, incredibly sarcastic, and a lot of fun to be around.

We hung around with the same group of friends through our time at Macalester, but we lost touch after graduation. Tim stayed in the Twin Cities, I moved to Portland, moved to Cyprus for a year, and eventually got divorced. I did a poor job of staying in touch with many of my college friends, and so while I heard what Tim was up to from time to time, I never really paid close attention. There was a lot of drama in my own life that occupied my attention.

When our 10-year class reunion rolled around, I was broke and living in a studio apartment nearing Loring Park in Minneapolis. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself to check in on anyone else. Imagine my surprise, then, when my phone rang one afternoon, and Tim Haviland was on the other end. I have no idea how he got my unlisted phone number, but he said he’d been wanting to track me down for awhile and was wondering if I was going to go to our class reunion.

I told him truthfully that a Macalester class reunion was one of the farthest things from my mind because of the state of my life at that time. We talked for a while, and he eventually talked me into going, mostly because he said he wanted to see me.

A couple of days later, I was on campus in St. Paul and giving Tim a long-overdue warm hug. Ten years had changed both of us, and we spent most of the day catching up as we walked around campus to see what had changed in the decade since we’d graduated.

At the end of the day, we hugged, shook hands, and went our separate ways. It was the last time I saw Tim alive.

It wasn’t until November 2001, when Macalester’s alumni magazine arrived in my mailbox in Houston, that I got the news that Tim had died on 9/11. It was as if someone pulled the floor out from under me. I wanted to scream…but I had no voice. I experienced pain unlike anything I’d ever experienced…but I was too numb to feel it. My brain was racing…but I couldn’t think clearly enough to form a rational thought.

I’d completely lost track of Tim over the decade since I’d last seen him, and I had no idea that he was in the New York/New Jersey area. As it happened, though, our lives had taken eerily similar turns. Tim had recently married and had two teenage stepsons. I had done the same. He had found his niche and, by all accounts, was very happy. Then he went to work one beautiful September Tuesday morning…and never came home.

Nine months later, during our 20th class reunion, we planted a tree on Macalester’s campus along with some soil from Ground Zero in Tim’s honor. I gave a short speech, but I was so overcome with emotion that I had no idea what I said. I remember holding on to the tree so I wouldn’t pass out. A few of my classmates also spoke, but I remember almost nothing of the ceremony. Or most of that entire day, to be honest. It was one of the hardest days of my life, far more difficult to get through than my father’s funeral.

I’ve been back to campus since to visit Tim’s tree. Of course, it’s much larger 19 years later, which is a good thing, I suppose. Tim was a large personality, after all. I don’t know if a tree is the best memorial, but it will have to do. I get back to campus a couple of times a year, and it gives me a chance to remember my friend.

Like many of us, I’m trying to put my emotions into some perspective, with tomorrow being the 20th anniversary of 9/11. I know that many lost large numbers of friends and loved ones, so I’m not going to pretend that my loss is anything special. Still, it’s my loss and my grief, and I need to honor that.

This week has been hard for me, much harder than I thought it might be. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch any of the myriad special programs commemorating the occasion. It’s just too painful. I can’t bring myself to relive that again.

I rarely write about 9/11 anymore because I’ve told my story enough. I see no need to re-tell it for the nth time. We should never forget what happened, and we should always remember those who died. We should mourn the innocence we all lost on that horrible day when everything changed.

Today- and tomorrow- I’ll mourn that part of me that I lost, but I’ll be mourning my friend Tim Haviland more than anything. He should’ve had the chance to grow old with Amy.

I miss you, Tim….