A memory that never left: Sask. dual citizen reflects on 9/11

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Winter Miller, right, at age 11 with her dad and brother. Her dad told her she would not be getting on a plane to return to Sask. from Oklahoma. (Image Credit: submitted/Winter Miller)

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He was right. Flights across the United States were grounded, and Miller’s planned trip back to Saskatchewan was suddenly impossible. Eventually, family members from Canada made the roughly three-day drive to Oklahoma to bring her home.

But the fear Miller experienced that day was about more than being stranded away from her mother. Since her dad was a member of the Oklahoma National Guard, she already understood what that could mean.

Six years earlier, when she was just six years old, she had stood in the yard of her family home near Stillwater, Oklahoma, and felt the ground shake.

The source was the Oklahoma City bombing, over 120 kilometres away.

“I knew the smell in the air. I knew the feeling of the grass under my feet,” Miller said. “There was a tree right beside me. My parents were standing in the yard. I knew everything that was going on.”

So did her father.

“He goes, ‘I’m going to get called,’” Miller recalled. “Right away he knew.”

He was sent to help with the response to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, where 168 people were killed, including 19 children. Miller said her dad came home a different person.

“He was very carefree … very social and just happy,” she said. “But then when he came back, it was like a dark cloud was over him.”

He had carried bodies from the building, including children. One little girl he helped rescue gave him a teddy bear and told him he had saved her life.

Children and teddy bears became difficult reminders of what he had seen. He became more secluded and would retreat to his room to deal with his emotions privately.

For Miller, that history made the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 even more frightening.

When the second plane struck the World Trade Center, she looked at her father and saw the same fear and trauma she had witnessed after Oklahoma City.

“Life just drained from him, because he knew,” she said.

Although he had been discharged from active service, he understood that his status with the National Guard meant he could potentially be called upon again.

Miller remembers her stepmother immediately taking hold of him.

“She grabbed him right away and said, ‘You’re not going. They’re not making you go again,’” Miller said.

Her father ultimately was not called to New York. An injury at the time also prevented him from being deployed to Afghanistan later, Miller said.

He was, however, invited to assist with the response at Ground Zero.

He declined.

“It just was bringing up all of the bombings,” Miller said.

The two events became intertwined in her family — one a tragedy her father experienced firsthand, the other a global attack that Miller witnessed through the eyes of an 11-year-old child who was supposed to be flying that very day.

Twenty-five years later, neither memory has entirely disappeared.

Miller said her father still has difficult periods. He continues to carry a remnant of the Oklahoma City bombing with him — literally. He keeps a piece of the building on a shelf in his room.

He is also not someone who seeks recognition for what he did, Miller said.

“He’s one that, somebody has to do the job, I get it and he gets it done,” she said.

He remains close to the National Guard members he served with, but Miller does not know whether he ever reconnected with the children or families he helped.

He has, however, become a loving grandfather, showing that, while the trauma has not disappeared, neither has the capacity for love and family.

A WORLD CHANGED BY FEAR

For Miller, Sept. 11 also represents a dividing line between two versions of the world.

She remembers a time before the attacks when flying in a large commercial aircraft felt ordinary, but that changed.

“I’ve never gone on a plane after that,” she said. “I never wanted to go on a plane after that.”

Miller has flown on smaller aircraft, but the prospect of boarding a large passenger plane remains frightening.

She knows intellectually that the plane she was supposed to board that day was not involved in the attacks, but emotionally, the connection remains.

“If it happened to two of them at the same time, then how could it not happen to any one of these?” she said.

She also sees the effects of that changed world in a broader sense.

Before Sept. 11, she said, people could move through their lives with a greater sense of freedom and less expectation that something catastrophic could happen, but afterward, fear became part of everyday life.

“We were in a carefree world, and now we’re not,” Miller said. “Now we’re in a hunker down, zombie apocalypse kind of world.”

For her, the uncertainty is particularly personal because she remains an American citizen.

Miller’s father, a member of the National Guard, was deployed to Iran and Greece but is pictured in Germany. The memory that changed him the most, however, was pulling dead children from the rubble in Oklahoma City. (Image Credit: submitted/Winter Miller)

The United States is still the place she considers home. She was born there and grew up there before moving to Canada with her mother following her parents’ divorce, but her life and family are now rooted in the north.

That creates another kind of uncertainty, particularly amid political changes in the United States.

“I’m scared to go home,” Miller said.

She worries about what could happen if she travelled to the United States and found herself caught up in changing immigration enforcement or political circumstances.

“I am an American citizen born there. However, my family is all Canadian — my family that I’ve made myself,” she said. “So to me it’s, do I go down there and then my family have to come home? Or do we get split up and I’m deported as they say? What happens?”

The uncertainty echoes the feelings she remembers from Sept. 11. and for Miller, uncertainty may be one of the most lasting legacies of politically motivated violence.

TEACHING THE NEXT GENERATION

Miller’s children did not experience Sept. 11. so for them, it is history.

They can watch the footage and see the photographs, but they cannot experience what it felt like to be in a house in Oklahoma as the world changed on television, or to understand that their grandfather might once again be called away to deal with the aftermath of an attack.

Miller talks to them about it every year. She keeps a large photograph from the Oklahoma City bombing and uses it as a starting point for conversations about both tragedies.

She tells them about their grandfather and what he experienced, but also about the people who died and the families they left behind.

She tries not to focus exclusively on the horror.

“We talk about how to be a good citizen and how to do all the good things,” she said. “We do talk about the nitty-gritty, but we don’t use a lot of our energy on that.”

The children are sometimes stunned by the images they see and ask questions that can be difficult to answer, including why people jumped from the World Trade Center towers.

Miller explains to them that people trapped in the buildings faced unimaginable choices as the fires and heat spread.

But she also recognizes that her children’s understanding can never quite match her own.

For Miller, Sept. 11 is a memory. For her father, Oklahoma City and its aftermath are lived experiences. For her children, both events are stories passed down through their family.

“I also tell them, it was traumatic for your grandfather, absolutely it was traumatic, but it’s different than my trauma,” she said.

Her children see her emotions when she tells the story, and through those emotions they begin to understand that the events were more than historical images.

But they cannot fully feel what she felt, and perhaps that is simply the nature of generations.

“You’ve got to be there to feel it,” Miller said.

But she also recognizes that her children’s understanding can never quite match her own.

For Miller, Sept. 11 is a memory. For her father, Oklahoma City and its aftermath are lived experiences. For her children, both events are stories passed down through their family.

“I also tell them, it was traumatic for your grandfather, absolutely it was traumatic, but it’s different than my trauma,” she said.

Her children see her emotions when she tells the story, and through those emotions they begin to understand that the events were more than historical images.

But they cannot fully feel what she felt, and perhaps that is simply the nature of generations.

“You’ve got to be there to feel it,” Miller said.

What she hopes they inherit from those stories, however, is not the fear that followed them.

Her wish for the future is surprisingly simple.

“I know that there’s dangers and stuff, but at the same time, put those in place, but get rid of this,” she said of borders and the divisions between countries or ideologies. “The world is the world and the land is the land. And there were no borders in the land when it was made.”

For Miller, the lesson she wants her children to carry forward is not fear, but compassion.

“People need to be kind to all humans,” she said.

It is a lesson shaped by two acts of violence that touched her family in very different ways, and by the years she has spent watching their effects linger.

The world changed on Sept. 11, 2001. But for Miller, it had already changed once before.

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susan.mcneil@pattisonmedia.com