As Cheryl Ball walked around the Remembering 9/11 exhibit at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, she cried.
“It brings back memories,” she said. “It’s just like when you walk onto the Arizona Memorial (at Pearl Harbor). All of a sudden, you get this immense feeling of emotions. Same thing walking through here. You get that same heaviness and emotions. Same thing when I went to Ground Zero at in New York, you get those same visceral emotions.”
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Ball, who lives in northern Idaho, said after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks happened, she didn’t see her husband — a Navy leader — for a week as he talked with others in other parts of the country.
Facing unknown
“He was essentially in what they call the skiff, which is the top secret room,” she said. “(I felt) shock, not knowing what was going to happen because I didn’t know what was going to happen with my husband … I knew he was going to be on the first plane out when they opened up the skies.”
Her cousin, Susan Jardim from Los Angeles, who was visiting the exhibit with her, said she was a teacher at the time of 9/11 and didn’t hear about the attacks until she got to school.
Relying on God
“Dealing with a lot of high school kids and a lot of emotion, it was just — it was a tough day,” she said. “You do a lot of listening … You do a lot of comforting. You can’t fall apart because if you fall apart, the kids fall apart. Thankfully, I did teach at private Christian school, so we were able to spend a lot of time in prayer, which we did, and that helped an awful lot.”
She said it strengthened her faith “seeing how everybody came together afterward and relied on each other and on God.”
