Tuesday September 11, 2001, I was getting a late breakfast, liquid as usual for the past two weeks, when the phone rang. I was waiting for bowel surgery for a non-life-threatening bowel tumour. We turned on the tiny kitchen television set and watched the second tower, and the world as we knew it, fall.

Last night I watched the first half of Extremely Loud and  Incredibly Close, the film story of an autistic boy coming to terms with his father’s death on the 105th floor. I stopped half way to cry. It was not my grief, of course. No one I knew died there. And I recovered from my bowel problem, thirty pounds lighter. But still I grieve.

When I was six, a bad thing happened – I almost died. The bad part was that the person I loved the most almost killed me.

Can life be this “bad”. Yes, my heart, but we can still, somehow, be all right.