Zibby Owens: Hi. Today, in honor of the 9/11 anniversary, I’m going to read a few essays that I’ve written about the loss I experienced that day. I lost my best friend and college roommate Stacey Sanders on 9/11. She worked in the North Tower on the 93rd floor. We’ll never really know what happened. She vanished that morning when we were both twenty-five. It has completely changed my life in so many ways. It wasn’t just my loss. It was the loss of, first of all, Stacey’s entire world and then a much larger scale, obviously the entire nation and world. I’m not trying to take 9/11 as my own personal day of grief. I wanted to share my experience with my loss in my one little life. Hopefully, people can relate if you’ve lost someone, not necessarily in a massive terrorist attack, but just from old age. Loss is loss. I hope my words help you.

I thought it might be interesting for me to read three essays, all short. The first one I wrote for my business school newspaper just two weeks after 9/11. The next, I wrote ten years later, and one I’ve just published today on modernloss.com. I hope that these essays, I’m not going to say make you feel better, maybe you weren’t feeling bad, but resonate with you in some way and at least give Stacey some airspace on a day that I wish like anything that she could be with us instead of just in my words. I’ll try to get through these. The first essay I wrote is called “Moving On.” Again, this is written for The Harvest. I was at Harvard Business School. I had just started school two weeks before. It’s called “Moving On.”

Wow, that feels like so long ago that I wrote that. That was two weeks after 9/11. I definitely was not back to normal at the time after writing that essay either. It took a very long time to function normally. At least I could go through the motions. Also, some of the facts and figures were not accurate because things were still so new. It was before we knew all the final information. Ten years later on September 13th, 2011, I wrote another short article, this time for Redbook. This was called “From her closet, with love.”

That was tough to read. Oh, my god. I have one more essay to read. That is from Modern Loss. It was published today. And I was wrong, it was twelve years after, not ten years after 9/11 that the Redbook article came out. Anyway, bear with me. This is my last one. Right now, it’s called “My 11 Life Rules Post-9/11: What losing my best friend taught me.” I don’t think that’s going to be the final title. First of all, there are only ten rules. I’m sure Modern Loss will give it a new title today. Here’s the essay.

<10 Lessons I Learned From My Friend’s 9/11 Death>

Those are my essays. Let me know what you think. Send me a direct message on Instagram, @ZibbyOwens. Email me, zibby@zibbyowens.com. Reach out to the people who you love and the friends that are important in your life because they might not always be there. Let them know how much they mean to you while you still can. Bye.

Dressed up together for Hallowe’en in college as the (Wo)men in Black!