9/11 Ten Years Later: Three Lives Changed, Three Reaching Out

Virtually no American, no Kirkland resident, has escaped the impact of the day 10 years ago when jihadist terrorists slammed airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

At the very least, we all carry dark memories of the events on Sept. 11, 2001, that stunned the world.

Most everyone now deals with heavier security at airports and events where crowds gather. If you forget your backpack or leave a package anywhere in public, today you’ll likely have to explain it to a police officer, as did a certain Patch editor a few months ago in downtown Kirkland.

Some of our daughters and sons, including my own, spend their days carrying automatic weapons in the mountains and deserts of countries a world away.

For some, like the Rev. Marian Stewart of Kirkland’s and Jawad Khaki, president of the nearby , those tragic events were met with resolve, and tangibly altered the course of their lives.

For others, such as Linda Clanin Swanberg of Juanita, the impact has been measured in tears.

“You just go through phases and you never know how you’re going to be hit,” says Swanberg, whose U.S. Marine son Shane Swanberg was killed in Iraq six years ago. “Grief is the strangest emotion.”

Perhaps more than most, these three people in Kirkland--Swanberg, Khaki and Stewart--have been affected by what we now refer to as simply “9/11.” So as the nation and Kirkland come together to remember those events 10 years ago, we asked them to share their thoughts.

A mother's loss

No Americans have been affected by the tragedy more than those who have lost loved ones. At least four servicemen from Kirkland have been lost during the military campaigns that followed 9/11, all slain in Iraq.

Swanberg’s son Shane, a 2000 graduate of , was 24 when he died from indirect fire at Camp Ramadi in September 2005. He had only been in Iraq 10 days and had emailed his mom the day before: “I will start my first mission tomorrow. Mom, I love you very much.”

One way his mother now deals with her grief is by reaching out to other families of the fallen, to the soldiers who were there when Shane died, and by helping the local VFW chapter in projects to benefit soldiers currently deployed.

She was on hand helping out in June when the Redmond-based VFW post #2995 .

“I’ve decided to support the living. I kind of try to do what I think Shane would want me to do,” she says. “He was always looking out for me after my divorce. I try to support his buddies. I keep hearing from his Marine buds. They’re broken-hearted."

Another way she copes is by keeping in touch with other “Gold Star” families who have lost loved ones in military service. Last Memorial Day, Swanberg attended a ceremony at the Garden of Remembrance at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, dedicated to fallen servicemen and women from Washington. The names of eight who lost their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq over the previous year were added to the wall.

“That’s a way for us to interact with families of the new fallen,” she says. “We try to keep in touch, but it’s hard because we are so spread out.”

Reaching out to others helps, Swanberg says, but the pain is always there. “I’m now about six years out and you would think it would go away.”

Shane left for Iraq in August 2005 and was killed on Sept. 15. The shadow of grief looms a little larger for Linda Clanin Swanberg at this time of year.

“In August, I just got melancholy,” she says, noting that another Washington mother lost her son around the same time. “I texted her and said ‘August is here.’ And she said ‘I’ll call tonight.’”

Reaching out

There are sad moments, too, for Jawad Khaki, an American citizen and president of the Ithna-asheri Muslim Association of the Northwest, based at the Iman Center on State Steet in Kirkland.

Despite dedicating his life after 9/11 to improving communication between peoples of differing faiths, U.S. Customs agents have repeatedly searched his smart phone when he returns from abroad.

“The 9/11 tragedy, for me personally, it changed my life a lot,” says the former longtime Windows NT executive for Microsoft, calling those who perpetrated the tragedy criminals.

However, he prefers to focus on his mission. Stunned by the events that day, he resolved to establish dialogue between diverse peoples.

"I committed myself to reaching out to different communites and different faiths, just trying to make sure people didn’t have a misunderstanding about this.”

One large step in that effort will be an interfaith observance of 9/11 on Sunday at the , “Ashes to Hope.”  Organized by the Rev. Stewart and Khaki, it will include Muslims, Christians, Jews, Mormons--and nonbelievers.

“We all know that a harmonious world is what we all want,” says Khaki, a native of Tanzania and former resident of the United Kingdom.  “Whether or not we believe in God, we all hold this universal value. We welcome everybody.”

'We're all humans'

Sunday’s observance is an encore, so to speak, of an interfaith service organized last year by Stewart in response to a conservative pastor in Florida who ceremoniously burned the Quran.

“I sent a news clip (about it) to the Iman Center,” says Stewart, who actually took up the ministry as a direct result of 9/11. “I said, ‘This is horrendous, I’d like to do something to show the other side.’”

The service was at Northlake Unitarian, and instead of burning the Quran, ministers read from it.

“After the service, you could feel the excitement of everybody being together,” Stewart says. “I couldn’t get them to go home.”

This year’s service will include more faiths, as well as nonbelievers, and will be at the much larger KPC beginning at 1 p.m.

Ten years after 9/11, Stewart says she hopes the message it sends will be powerful.

“We can always view other religions as ‘other,’” she says. “As long as it’s not us, we can hide behind our walls. It’s easy to go to war and attack and demean each other. But once you get to know the people, you understand we’re all humans, we all have sisters, brothers, mothers and fathers, and we all want to live happy lives.

“It’s so important to reach out.”

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For a series of snapshots and stories from Patch sites around America about how 9/11 has affected people’s lives, click here.