Thursday, May 5, 2011

Grown man crying..........

I'm by anyone's standards a grown man. Like most men, I almost never cry. That I can remember at this point, I can count the times on one hand in my adult life. When my Dad died, then my Mom and when our Daughter was laying in the hospital on the edge of death (She survived fine in the end, thank you).

Like a lot of folks, I'm a fan of National Public Radio. I listen to it religiously every morning on my way to work and every evening on the way home. No screaming music or bullshit talk radio for me. I enjoy what I consider to be a station for intelligent, thoughtful people like I consider myself to be.

By the way. This week is their pledge time. Get your butt over to their website
(http://www.capradio.org/default.aspx) and share some of your wealth to keep this great service we all depend so heavily on going.

As we all know, the airwaves right now including Public Radio are filled to the brim with the death of Osama Bin Laden. This morning during the Morning Addition segment, a piece they call a driveway moment came on for me. That's what they call a story that you find so compelling that you stay in your car until it's over. Before this piece was over, I could barely see, I was crying so much. I was bawling like a baby after receiving their first shot in the leg at the doctors office.

Giving full credit to National Public Radio's Morning Addition segment, I feel compelled to pass the story on to you. This is straight off their website (May 5, 2011), verbatim.
Now this was in Mrs. Beverly Eckert's own words and voice. As you can imagine, she was gently crying throughout the entire telling. It was her voice and deeply felt emotions that finaly tipped me over the edge.




Beverly Eckert lost her husband, Sean Rooney, in the south tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. She remembers her husband's warm brown eyes, dark curly hair, and that he was "a good hugger."

The two met at a high school dance, when they were only 16 years old. When Rooney died, they were 50.

On Sept. 11, Rooney called his wife at 9:30 a.m. He told her he was on the 105th floor, and he'd been trying to get out.

"He told me that he, you know, hadn't had any success and now the stairwell was full of smoke," Eckert says. "I asked if it hurt for him to breathe and he paused for a moment, and says, 'No.' He loved me enough to lie."

After a while, they stopped talking about escape routes and instead focused on the happiness they'd shared together.

"I told him that I wanted to be there with him, but he said, no, no, he wanted me to live a full life," she says.

As the smoke got thicker, Rooney whispered, " 'I love you,' over and over," Eckert says. "I just wanted to crawl through the phone lines to him, to hold him, one last time."

Then she heard a sharp crack, followed by the sound of an avalanche. The building was beginning to collapse. Eckert called Rooney's name into the phone repeatedly, and then she just sat there, pressing the phone to her heart.

"I think about that last half-hour with Sean all the time. I remember how I didn't want that day to end, terrible as it was, I didn't want to go to sleep because as long as I was awake, it was still a day that I'd shared with Sean," she says.

Rooney had kissed Eckert goodbye that morning before going to work. She says, "I could still say that was just a little while ago, that was only this morning. And I just think of myself as living life for both of us now. And I like to think that Sean would be proud of me."


So go ahead and ask me what I think of Osama Bin Laden's death. Should he have been captured and tried in a court of law? Should they show the pictures of him as proof of his death? Who should get credit for his capture and death?
To every question you might ask, my answer is exactly the same. I don't give a shit!
Mrs. Beverly Eckert's personal story is the only reality that matters at this point.

The rest is pure unadulterated bullshit.




Now click on the "Comments" link at the bottom of this blog and add your response or thoughts for others to see when they click on the "Comments" link (Try it now!). It makes it far more interesting if we make it a conversation, instead of just my bullshit. Thank you to those who take the time and effort to do so.....
COME ON..........DO IT!!!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You are so right, Paul. When you wipe away all the politics of any situation you're left with the only thing that really counts. The human stories. - Thanks for sharing.