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My mother knows exactly what she was doing November 22, 1963. A first year teacher, she was leading a class when a student stuck his head in her room and said, “The president has been shot.”

“That’s not funny,” she said. It wasn’t a joke.

She also remembers it was a Friday, and the senior prom was planned for the next day. There was great debate about the prom going on as planned, and the students voted to have it. It was the week before Thanksgiving, and they closed the school the following week.

She reiterated those facts this weekend, when I called to research this. She can remember it like it was yesterday, but I am sure if I asked what she had for breakfast yesterday, she would have to think about it. What is it about tragedies that freeze us in a moment, leaving part of us stuck there forever?

I remember a substitute teacher telling us that the night before, John Lennon had been shot and killed. I was in the fourth grade then, yet I remember it as vividly as the cold November morning that Katie Couric told us George was gone, too.

I remember watching Saturday Night Live with my roommates when Brian Williams broke in to say that Princess Diana had been in a car accident in Paris. With each breaking news report, we held our breath a little more, until Brian broke in and told us that our fairy tale princess was gone. The three of us set our alarms so we could watch her funeral as it happened. The streets of London were full of people, just like they were when we all set our alarms to watch her get married not that many years before.

I remember my phone ringing before 9 on a Saturday morning. It was Timmer. “Are you bleeding or on fire,” I asked, groggy with weekend sleep. “John’s plane is missing,” he said. I sat up, suddenly wide-awake. He didn’t have to tell me who John was. I knew. We went to a pub-crawl that day, but I hardly participated. I was too busy concentrating on the TVs all the bars had on, tuned to CNN. I kept watching, unwilling to let go of that thin thread of hope for our handsome JFK. They did find his plane at last. When I went home a couple weeks later for my high school reunion, the Kennedy family quietly returned him to the sea.

And I remember that sunny Tuesday in September when Matt Lauer was interviewing Richard Hack about his book Hughes. In the middle of the interview, Matt said they had to break away. I called my friend Suzy to tell her that some dumb ass had flown his bi-plane into the World Trade Center. I saw the second plane come on screen. I saw it was a plane, but my first instinct was that it was a news helicopter. Then it turned, and with a red explosion, the world turned sideways. I don’t even think I told Suzy goodbye before I hung up the phone. It wasn't until the next day that I found out that our friend Brian Terrenzi, who had worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, had been lost.

So where is this coming from, this morbid trip through the tragedies of years past…

Twenty-two years ago today, I was in the ninth grade. We were studying China in Social Studies, so our teachers arranged a “field trip” to a nearby Chinese restaurant, because nothing says China like a restaurant in Kirkwood, N.Y., simply called Szezuan Cuisine. We had gone early, before our usual lunchtime. When we got back to school, the halls were eerily quiet. I was at my locker getting my books for French when my English teacher poked her head out of her room. “The space shuttle blew up,” she said.

“The one with the teacher on it?” I asked.

We spent our French class squeezed in with the Spanish class across the hall, because they happened to have a TV. The footage played over and over—Challenger launching, that spark of a flame, the explosion and then those two snakes of smoke that seemed to be trying to reach out for each other.

We all sat in stunned silence; twitching each time they showed Challenger’s fiery end. Maybe we hoped that the next time we saw it, the result would be different, and Christa McAuliffe and the other astronauts were still flying out into the cosmos.

They were, but not the way we hoped.

“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’” —from President Reagan’s address that night, quoting the poem High Flight by John Gillespie Magee Jr.