As Ivana and her husband entered a taxi cab, she observed that the once silent cityscape now bustled with the sounds of colleagues chatting as they perused the city streets in business casual attire, with locally brewed coffee in plastic cups locked in their palms. It was about half an hour after United Airlines Flight 175 had crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Ivana had experienced contractions since awakening earlier that morning. She adjusted her legs and got as comfortable as she could in the small yellow cab while her husband dialed the directory telephone number for Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan, fifteen minutes away. Cars had piled up on the roads as fear and confusion set in. After an hour, they had barely moved. Left on hold for the entire time, an attendant finally picked up on the other end. Marian was able to ask the question that they dreaded asking on that fateful Tuesday. “Are you able to have my wife come in? She’s in labor we believe,” he said quickly with a thick Slovak accent, trying to avoid getting put on hold again. “Spots are filling up extremely quickly. Get here as fast as possible.” Ivana had mustered up the strength to yell thanks as they hung up the call and began to approach the hospital. The stress of the situation had begun to make her skull throb. To add to everything, this was the closest hospital to the World Trade Center. She envisioned walking in with her husband to see a ramshackle, improvised morgue, with not much distinction between the living and the dead in the lobby filled with portable beds of bloodied, burned, confused, broken people. As she nearly vomited the contents of her breakfast onto the seat of the taxicab, he motioned the driver to keep going. After about twenty minutes, they pulled up close to the hospital’s front entrance, with Marian
tipping the young man, a fellow immigrant, who had been their driver. As they entered the mayhem, they were immediately told that there would not be room. Given a map to Long Island Jewish Hospital, Ivana gasped knowing that, in regular conditions, this was an hour-long drive. Fortunately, their cab driver still had not left his spot outside the hospital. The drive to Long Island ended up taking six hours, which meant that my mother remained in labor for over twelve hours before she was even admitted into a hospital bed. As I sat on a leather living-room couch with her sixteen years later, far away from the urban monstrosity of New York City, my mother recounted that although she had fallen asleep for most of the ride, the sound of the metropolis soon switched from one of pure fear and loud confusion to a strangely silent grief. But the expanse of vehicles on the road did not change, and everyone had pressed their ears close to the raspy sound waves coming out of their car radios for updates. I had held on the whole time, refusing to let myself enter the world until soon after midnight, where I was born without any complications in a quiet hospital. Unsurprisingly, this story has held on through time. If I had not held on in my mother’s womb on the day of the terrorist attacks, my birth may have taken place in a taxicab and been even more difficult for my mother. I have held onto priorities, onto friends, onto faith, and so much more for seventeen years. My family has held on through major bumps in our relationships, through living a world away from close relatives and friends. My parents both held on through the arduous process of acclimating to and making a good living for themselves in America. “But life never stops. We will keep holding on,” my mother tells me.
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