Corey Peter Miller

He left his home in Queens that morning to take the train into the City.  Heading for his job there as a supply manager, he might have been thinking about what needed to be done that day.  Or he may have been worried about his widowed mother or younger sister, Cara, who has cerebral palsy.  Perhaps he might have been thinking about Stacy Rosen, his fiancée.  Or he could have been planning to attend a hockey game with some of his friends.

After he had logged on at work at the multi-national investment firm, he settled in and began working.  He may have thought about how he needed to keep working to enable him and Stacy to buy an apartment and get it set up.  But Corey Peter Miller had no idea what he soon would be thinking about.  He would be experiencing overwhelming fear and terror as he faced his imminent demise.  Those feelings were his and almost 3,000 others that morning of September 11, 2001 in the World Trade Center.

I’m not sure how much control he had over the circumstances of his survival that fateful day.  I thought about him and those were killed or who died as I visited Ground Zero last week.   I experienced and wrote about the potential of my own unexpected death in a recent posting, I came to feel then in some way what it might be like to know that you might soon die, and as I walked around the two fountains there that occupy the space where the Twin Towers stood, reading the names of the dead, I felt a knot in my stomach as I considered their fates. 

I started crying as I silently strolled around the fountains.  Thinking back on that warm Friday afternoon  last week, I wonder if I was not only crying for them but also for myself.  Corey Peter Miller and others had their lives snuffed out with no regard as to their future lives and plans.  I realized once again how dear my life is to me, how desperately I want to keep living,

Like my tears and those of many others, the fountains starkly flow downward on all four sides of the squares then fall again into smaller squares where the water disappears—like they did.  Even though I have faith that existence does not end in death—I’m not sure whether or not Corey Peter Miller did—I am still overwhelmed by how fragile we are.   I realized again how wonderful it is to live another day.