One woman in my department called to ask if I wanted her to go to the World Trade Center buildings to see what information she might be able to gather from first responders. I said yes.

Then, the unimaginable happened, then was shown again, and then again. The first of the two towers collapsed. We stood watching the television screen in disbelief. How many people were in that building? The loss of life was inconceivable.

My mind, however, was on the woman I had told to go to the site. There was no way to reach her. Was she O.K.? Her husband called. “Have you heard from her?” he asked. No, I said. He called back, it seemed, every hour on the hour. It was my job to repeat no. (She said that when the building fell, someone thankfully pushed her into a neighboring building. She walked back across the Brooklyn Bridge, like many others who were covered in ash like ghostly apparitions.)

Of all the ghastly images from that day, one struck me most: It was what looked like birds at the top of one of the towers. They weren’t. People were jumping to certain death. What must that decision have been like? Fire at your back, no help on the way. Jump or burn. Thinking about it to this day chills my skin.

One man in the department broke down crying. His mother worked at the World Trade Center. He wasn’t sure if she was in the building or not. I told him to go home. His pain was personal. The rest of us would have to work through our shock and grief for the sake of millions of others depending on us to make sense of this. That’s journalism.

But then the other tower collapsed. Then a plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Then a plane crashed in Pennsylvania. There seemed no way to make a coverage plan because there was no way to fully get our arms around what was going on and when it would end. Further complicating things, the phone lines were overwhelmed. It felt like only one out of every 10 calls was getting out.

This was going to require that we work well into the night. But, what about my children? What was I going to do? The babysitter called in the early afternoon to say that she had retrieved them from school (which had closed early) and that she could stay as long as needed. She was my personal hero that day. The bus got caught in a massive traffic jam. She got off and walked across Brooklyn to reach my children. She stayed with them late into the night, leaving her own children with her husband.