While I am always sobered by what happened on this day, I have mixed emotions because of what happened to my wife and me on this day. Let me tell you a little story. Jump into the wayback machine with me, setting the dial back to 15 years ago yesterday . . .
doodle doo . . . doodle doo . . . doodle doo . . .
My wife and I had just returned home from our last childbirth class, with our first child due in a couple weeks. I had some kind of intestinal thing going on, not feeling all that well, but still happy we had finished the class. We were just crawling into bed, sometime around 10 pm. As we situate the sheets and get ready to turn out the lights, my wife's eyes go wide. "I think my water just broke!"
In that moment, I thought to myself "I am most definitely NOT ready to be a father!"
Now, I'd heard that women, when pregnant, suffer a bit of a loss of bladder control, so I said to her "are you sure you didn't just wet the bed?" Yeah, not something you say to someone 8 1/2 months pregnant. She gave me the stinkeye and reiterated that she most definitely did not wet the bed. We call the doctor and ask what we should do, and he tells us to get right down to the hospital. To me, things are happening pretty fast, but I'm sure my lady will tell you it was a long, drawn out process.
Anyhow, to make a long story short, our son was born in the wee hours of the morning on April 19, 1995. After all the clean up and whatnot, we're relaxing a bit and turn on the TV morning news to see what looks like mass confusion on every channel. After a bit we finally figure out what's going on.
So, in honor of the 168 people who lost their lives on that day I will celebrate my son's birth. I like to think about it this way: It doesn't matter what evil things happen, or how terrible things are, somewhere somebody is having the best day of their lives and something good is happening. We can only hope that the good outweighs the bad.