I have an uncanny ability to always look at the clock when it’s 9.11. It’s never 9.10 or 9.12. Although 9.11 refers to the time and not the day, it brings me right back to that day, when my husband, Eddie Torres, was murdered at the World Trade Center. At the time, I was seven and a half months pregnant.

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When did we settle on “9/11” as an acceptable way to refer to that terrible day? I remember my discomfort with the shorthand as it formed but now the writer in me likes its compact, pithy quality.

So too the statistic of how many people died. More shorthand: “About 3,000.” Does anyone ever remember – or care – to get this number right? That rounding out to 3,000, so clean and easy, has always felt like a lazy affront.

In fact, 2,753 people died at the World Trade Center. Another 184 were killed at the Pentagon. Forty more died when United Airlines flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. These numbers do not include those who have died in the years since, many due to illnesses related to their work at the crash sites.

In the 17 years, seven months and four days since 9/11, I have experienced so many things that have belittled or trivialized my widowhood. My first experience with public mockery occurred in February 2002, with the publication of Ted Rall’s Terror Widows comic strip by the New York Times.

According to Rall, we widows were greedy and relished in the gory details of our husbands’ deaths. We loved being on TV and saying stupid things. I walked around even more dazed, confused and pained. “How could this be?” I thought.

The Times published a picture, a sweet if traumatized gaggle … The focal point was a lone woman wearing a hijab

Whenever I’ve shared my 9/11 “backstory” with someone new in my life, the moment has often been fraught. Many people have flubbed the moment, launching into their own story about their banal 9/11 day. I’m glad it was inconsequential for them and their loved ones stayed safe. But such odd attempts at an impossible empathy break me deep inside. Always pleasant, I nod without listening and wait for the moment to pass.

But after all these years of having my un-healable wound poked at in all kinds of ways all of the time, I’ve softened and dulled. As such, when Ilhan Omar stated “some people did something”, when she referred to 9/11 at the Council on American-Islamic Relations in California, it barely registered at all. Indeed it was terrible, yet to me it was just another 9/11 shorthand.

Her comment sparked public outrage. In me, it sparked a specific memory, contained inside a photograph.

In early September 2002, an extreme and powerful political group called the Independent Women’s Forum held a baby shower for a group of 9/11 widows, women whose children were born after their husbands died. Too late, I realized the group had co-opted our tragedy. I had come there to bond with the women, my sisters, with whom I shared the surreal mix of sorrow and joy, of sudden traumatic loss followed by the bringing of new life.

The Times published a group picture of us as a sweet if traumatized gaggle of women and babies. The focal point was a lone woman wearing a hijab, holding her baby just like the rest of us.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A New York Times report, from September 2002. The author is at top left. Photograph: Provided by Alissa Torres.

I have not seen this woman or her baby again. But over the years I have wondered about them and their terrible, ironic fate: never to be seen as victims, always to be marked as potentially culpable.

While I am not outraged about Omar’s 9/11 comment, there is so much that I am outraged about. So many years after 9/11, I feel uncomfortably fortunate compared with the victims of today’s public violent attacks. Ted Rall and his supporters were the worst of my trolls and the New York Times was immediately responsive, taking down his comic.

How is it possible that today’s victims must contend with so much more? Think of those who lost children or other loved ones at Sandy Hook, in Las Vegas, at the high school in Parkland, Florida. Aside from the media attention and political battles they fight as they attempt to ensure what happened to them never happens to anyone else, their devastated lives are further devastated by the attentions of conspiracy theorists aided and abetted by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google. These powerful companies fail to protect them from the harassing onslaughts.

Finally, I am outraged that there is more outrage directed against Omar than there is against the undermining of national security systems that were put in place after 9/11. Whole federal departments have been left leaderless or under inferior care. One day, some people will do something to us and they will succeed, because those in charge failed in their duties to protect us, distracted as they were by trumped-up battles with make-believe enemies.