Hi. Today, in honor of the 9-11 anniversary, I'm going to read a few essays that I've written about the loss I experienced that day. I lost my best friend and college roommate Stacey Sanders on 9-11. She worked in the North Tower on the 93rd floor and we'll never really know what happened, but she vanished that morning when we were both 25 and it has

completely changed my life in so many ways. It wasn't just obviously my loss. It was the loss of,

first of all, Stacey's entire world and then a much larger scale, obviously, the entire nation and

world. I'm not trying to take 9-11 as my own personal day of grief, but I wanted to share my experience with my loss in my one little life, and hopefully people can relate.

And maybe if you've lost someone, not necessarily in a massive terrorist attack, but just from old age, loss is loss.

And I hope my words help you.

I thought it might be interesting for me to read three essays, all short.

The first one I wrote for my business school newspaper, just two weeks after 9-11.

The next I wrote 10 years later and one I've just published today on Modernloss.com.

So I hope that these essays, I've just published today on modernloss.com.

So I hope that these essays, I don't know, I'm not going to say make you feel better,

maybe you weren't feeling bad, I don't know, but just resonate with you in some way and at least give Stacey some airspace on a day that I wish, like anything,

that she could be with us instead of just in my words. So I'll try to get through these. The first essay I wrote is called Moving On. Again, this is written for The Harvest. I was at Harvard Business School. I had just started school two weeks before. It's called Moving On. I lost my best friend last week in the World Trade Center incident. Although I'm trying very hard to make my life go back to normal, I'm slowly realizing that this may be one goal that's just unattainable, even for a first-year HBS student. Stacey and I met the first day of college and became best friends practically overnight. We lived across the hall from each other freshman year and then lived together for the following three years at Yale. I moved to L.A. after graduation, but when I moved back home to New York, I lived with Stacey for another year until I left for school this summer, and I think she came on more family vacations with me than my brother did. The fact that Stacey was killed by terrorists, while just sitting at her desk on the 96th floor of Tower One is still incomprehensible to me.

How could this have happened? Why Stacey? Why my best friend? Why those 6,400 people? If the plane

had struck an hour before, she'd be alive and well, and we could be dealing with the terrifying

world events together, not apart. If she could be killed in such a random way, does that mean

that my life is as much

at risk as hers was? I could ask these questions all day, and some days I do. But there

aren't any answers. I can't crack this case. Instead, I have to just move on, unsettled,

incomplete, rattled. I went home for almost two weeks, first to try to help find Stacey in the

many New York

hospitals, post missing signs, and search websites for news.

...