Many people are surprised when I tell them that I did not watch the news that Tuesday. I busied myself by keeping the girls occupied, and fielding and making phone calls—when the phone lines worked—hoping for information. I also began to write a letter to Jeff, telling him to “come home to me, come home to me and the girls.” I thought I’d be able to show him the letter when he walked in the door, but the letter ended up becoming a journal entry instead, one of countless such entries to come.

Read: Another September 11 without a dad

It took me a long time to realize that Jeff was really and truly gone, and when I did, I struggled to figure out what my new reality meant. I met and married Jeff when I was in my late 30s, and when it became clear that we were meant to be, I had to learn to lean on him, a task that was not easy for me, an independent New Yorker. Now he was gone, after only four and a half years of marriage, and I had two daughters to raise alone. The terrorists took my husband from me; there was no way I was going to let them ruin my daughters’ precious psyches too. I planned to win.

I wanted our daughters’ lives to be as close to what they would have been if Jeff were alive to help me raise them, and I told my girls that we would continue to do the things that “Mommy and Daddy planned to do.” My mom and I taught the girls how to snorkel off our dock at the lake, and they taught themselves to catch fish underwater using nets. I can still see these little goggle-wearing girls in my mind’s eye, and my heart aches when I realize Jeff hadn’t been alive to see them.

The girls and I regularly ventured to Maho Bay Camps, an eco-resort (that unfortunately no longer exists) on St. John. We traveled there yearly until their sports schedules dictated otherwise. When they were 7 and 9 years old, we went on a snorkel excursion boat, out to a coral reef in a protected cove. It was a particularly windy day, and there was a lot of chop in the ocean: not the best day to snorkel, especially for young children. Other vacationers were queasy, but the girls were fine, even excited, so we kept going.

My girls were the youngest children on the boat, and I remember the other families watching us as I gathered up our gear to be first in line to enter the ocean via the slide. I was determined to make sure my girls were not afraid. I literally pushed Maggie down the slide ahead of me, then grabbed Charlotte and we went down together. I swam backwards, hooked my fingers through the girls’ life preservers, and dragged them along, telling them to kick, kick, kick, as I sang a little song about Mommy and Daddy going diving with our girls, a song I made up on the spot. Divers my girls would be.

I knew that it was important to keep Jeff alive for my girls, to give them information about their father, so they would know his likes and dislikes, and what he might have said or done in different situations. Jeff and I loved to travel, and whenever we traveled anywhere, I would tell our girls how pleased Daddy would be with their adventurous nature. “Mommy and Daddy wanted to have good travelers,” I would say. Sometimes, even now, when my daughters and I are exploring a walled medieval city in Europe, I turn to them and repeat that phrase, to make them smile.