On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people lost their lives, and many thousands of others lost loved ones.

I lost a key.

This requires some explanation.

For me, even before the tragedy, September 11, 2001 was no ordinary day.

My life was in some disarray that Tuesday morning. My wife Leslie and I lived, with our eight year-old daughter and 2 year-old son, in Puryear, Tennessee, just south of the Kentucky state line. We were not there on September 11, however. On July 2 of that year, the attic of our small house had caught fire at midday. The damage was extensive, and we were forced to find a temporary home in Paris, some 12 miles away. The rental house was in disrepair, but it was at least closer to work, and our home was to be restored by late October.

Dislocation, though grossly inconvenient, was the least of my problems.

Eleven months earlier, my 37 year-old brother Tim had finally succumbed to Lou Gehrig’s disease, after 13 years of suffering that had all but killed my parents as well. By the time Tim died, in August 2000, our father, who was only 58, had been diagnosed with cancer and had undergone extensive surgery to remove and reconstruct his bladder. After Tim’s death, it appeared that Dad would rally. For several months, he and my mother, liberated for the first time in years, were able to go places and have fun. It was not to last. By August 2001, one year after Tim’s passing, Dad was sick again, and this time he was dying. Early in September, he suffered a massive seizure and was hospitalized in Paris, not far from my temporary home. The cancer had spread to his brain.

I was not myself that summer. My thoughts and my actions often seemed not to be my own.  Tim’s illness had become a cornerstone of my existence. In retrospect, I had not adjusted well to the sudden calm that his death had brought. I found myself greatly relieved by his passing, and that seemed a wrong, almost alien emotion, one that troubled me. I had hoped to regain my footing over summer vacation, but the fire caused tremendous disruption at a time when I was ill-equipped to cope with it. Dad’s relapse was the final blow, or so I hoped.

On a normal work day, I would rise at about six, shower and dress, and drive the 15 miles to Big Sandy School, in Big Sandy, Tennessee, where I had taught high school social studies for six years. On the morning of September 11, the scene was similar, but the plan was different—and sad. I had to leave early that morning. Before going to work, I was to detour five miles beyond the school to my parents’ home, where I had grown up. Mom was at the hospital with Dad, and the house was deserted, but I had a grim job to do. In the front bedroom, on the very spot where Tim had died, was the bed my dad had used since becoming sick the second time. My task was to disassemble that bed and store it out of the way. Later that day, the doctors were sending Dad home—sending him home with a hospital bed in which to die. It was all neatly arranged: transportation, bed, hospice. He was expected to last a few days.

I arrived at my parents’ empty house slightly before 7:15 central time, just as American Airlines flight 77 was taking off from Washington, en route to Los Angeles, and at the very moment when American Airlines flight 11 first failed to acknowledge instructions from flight control. I had not remembered my key, but I knew that there was an extra back door key hidden on a small post behind my dad’s rain gauge. I retrieved the key, went inside, placed it . . . somewhere, and disassembled my father’s bed. As I worked, I reflected on what a year it had been and on the strange irony that there was to be a second sickbed, a second deathbed, in the spot where Tim had suffered for so many years and had finally died.

It all seemed profoundly unfair.

I moved the disassembled bed to the laundry room, thinking about work. Normally, I arrived at school at exactly 7:30. It was 7:35, and I was still at Mom’s.

Hundreds of miles away, two F-15 pilots were suiting up and preparing to intercept American Airlines flight 11.

As I walked out the door of my parents’ house, I remembered the key.

My mother had explained that if I used the extra key I had to be certain to return it to its hiding place. Later that day, my Uncle Kelley would be arriving to open the house so the hospital bed could be brought in and assembled prior to Dad’s return by ambulance. Uncle Kelley had no key of his own; without this one, he would have to drive 20 miles to Paris for Mom’s key. The house was full of medical equipment and pain medication. Leaving it unlocked was not an option. It was critical that nothing disrupt the carefully choreographed return of my dying father or his bed. Dad was mostly unconscious and unaware of his surroundings, but Mom did not need the strain of additional confusion and uncertainty.

I reached in my pocket. I looked around. The key was gone. It had simply vanished.

I am a rationalist. Well, most of the time I am a rationalist. In that sense, at least, I am more Jefferson than Lincoln, not given to magical thinking. Physical objects do not disappear into the ether. In any event, the key was an important component of the day’s tragic plan and had to be found. I turned my pockets inside out. I went over the house. I looked under furniture, moved the dismantled bed and shined a light under the freezer. Then I did it all again. I even looked outside until I realized the futility of looking outdoors for a key that had brought me indoors.

The key was gone.

Physical objects do not disappear into the ether.

Still, to my  knowledge no one ever saw it again.

I was frustrated and furious that I had brought inconvenience to my uncle and trouble and concern to my distraught mother, but even though first period was a planning period for me, school began at 8:00, and I was still 5 miles away. I looked at my watch; it was just after 7:45. I angrily slammed the back door and returned to my truck. As I raced out of the driveway, radio off, flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York.

I drove too fast, arriving at school very late by my standards, but not officially late. Classes would not start for seven to eight minutes, and I did not have a class for more than an hour. I deposited my belongings in my classroom at the end of the hall, said a quick good morning to my colleagues, and proceeded to the office. There, I called my mother at Henry County Medical Center to explain—or fail to explain—about the key. She was upset but said that she would work something out with Uncle Kelley. I rushed back to my room, grabbing a cup of coffee on the way, and began my day, trying to put my father’s impending death out of my mind.

Our students only had three minutes between classes, so the periods began and ended at odd times. I do not remember what I did that morning between 8:00 and 8:56, when first period ended. I am sure it was routine work. I later noted that, due to the confusion of arriving late at school, I had never opened the internet on my desktop computer, so I was blissfully ignorant of the drama unfolding in the Northeast. Unaware even of the first crash, I had no idea that, shortly after I ended my phone call with Mom and just as my planning period had begun, a second plane had crashed into the South Tower. At 8:59, the first of my day’s two economics classes began. At that exact minute, in Manhattan, the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.

Second period economics was a group of about 25 eleventh graders who were among my favorite students ever, before or since. I have no recollection of our lesson that day. Perhaps I assigned classwork since, at around 9:20, I returned to my desk for something. My classroom door was slightly ajar, so it was possible for someone to enter silently. I was preoccupied, checking something in my grade book program, when I sensed someone standing in front of me. I looked up to see my boss and long-time friend, Mike Bell, the Big Sandy School principal. His face was pallid. At first, I could not comprehend what he wanted, but then I regained awareness of my personal situation and concluded, in an instant, that my father had died. I sometimes remember important conversations verbatim, or nearly so, but this time I cannot. In effect, he said that terrorists had crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York, that part of the building had collapsed, and that some buildings had been bombed. The latter proved to be a rumor—though not far from the truth. I think he also said that there may have been as many as ten more such events to come. My mind reeled. I asked if I could tell the students and turn on the television. He said that I could, but that we might not be changing classes at 9:46.

Mr. Bell left, and I turned on the television. My class is at the end of a long run of cable, and I have always had fuzzy reception. The clearest station was CBS, and as I tuned in I prayed it was all an exaggeration. By this time, I was carefully informing my students of the reports, preparing them for what we might see, and pointing out that it might not be true at all. We first saw the towers burning, unaware that the South Tower had already fallen and that we were watching a replay. My assessment was that this was a dreadful tragedy, but a containable one. Then, CBS returned to live coverage, and I saw that one of the towers was actually gone. This was beyond my comprehension, and I stumbled with the thought that this might be an attack by a foreign power. We soon learned that a plane had already crashed into the Pentagon. Some of my students were crying. I just remember standing with my hand over my mouth. Finally, I turned to them and said, “Don’t forget this moment. If a country did this, Congress will declare war by tomorrow. Congress has not declared war since 1941.” Within about a minute, the North Tower collapsed before our eyes. For me, the most memorable line of the entire tragedy came when a shaken Dan Rather said simply, “There are no words to describe this.”

Stunned, I crossed the hall to my colleague Tracy’s room. I pushed her door open. She was on her feet, handing something out to her students. I must have looked as pale as Mr. Bell had, for her smile faded when she saw me. I motioned to her. When she was at the door, out of earshot of her students, I whispered, unknowingly using the same words that Chief of Staff Andrew Card had just whispered to the President of the United States. “Tracy,” I said, “the United States is under attack.” I then hastily related the rest of what I knew. Like so many of us, she seemed to wonder how scared she should be. I was not reassuring.

Later, we would cope with the tragedy by helping our students create commemorative posters for the classroom doors. Mine was black, with a photo of a burning candle in one corner, a photo of a beautiful little girl holding a candle in front of her face in the opposite corner, and in the middle was a quotation from Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 message to Congress: “We cannot escape history. . . . The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. . . . We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

The rest of that day, and much of the days that followed, is a blur. Because I was a lifelong student of history, public policy, and government, people called on me to explain, opine, and reassure. I often failed. A rare clear memory is of my writing a list of possible suspects on the board. Bin Laden was on the list, but he was not at the top. I assumed Iran had decided to go out in a blaze of glory.

I later learned how the horror unfolded in my father’s hospital room. My mother, along with some nurses, watched the coverage until Dad, in his delirium, began to hallucinate that there were helicopters in his room. At that, Mom turned off the television and knew little else about the event until later that night.

Dad came home for the last time on the afternoon of the worst American catastrophe of modern times. He died, on the very spot where Tim had died, on September 19, slightly more than a week after the attacks. On Thursday night September 20, President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. I quietly listened, alone in my truck, sitting in the dark in the parking lot of Stockdale-Malin Funeral Home in Big Sandy.

I was never able to understand what happened to the lost key of September 11. At the very least, the sad tasks I performed that morning and the search for the key provided a narrative, a personal metric through which I could remember and comprehend and relate the great tragedy that was about to burst upon my vision. Though I attribute no supernatural importance to that elusive little strip of brass, I am hard-pressed to explain how it simply vanished. Had I paused, in my exasperated search, to observe that the world was behaving strangely that morning, I would have been vindicated soon enough.

Mystical or mundane, for me the key has taken on a sort of metaphorical resonance, a tangible though lost reminder of a time when many other kinds of loss—emotional, familial, national—seemed, for a brief moment, to flow in the same channel.