FORT MILL, S.C. — Rita Ripkey lives a simple life these days. She’s married with children and has a small photography studio in Fort Mill.
“After 9/11, you kind of reevaluate your priorities a little bit,” she said.
For Ripkey, Sept. 11 will always be the day that she almost didn’t make it home.
“I was working for Citigroup,” she recalled. “We were located at 7 World Trade Center.”
On the morning of Sept. 11, Ripkey got to the office early. She worked out in the gym and settled into her desk on the 33rd floor of the complex to eat her breakfast.
“All of a sudden, I heard this big loud noise,” she said.
Ripkey grew up in Israel and said from the time she was a young child, she was trained to immediately react.
“You hear something, you scram,” she said.
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Ripkey looked around the office and saw papers floating through the air. She then looked around and watched as things around her started falling. People were coming into the office, so she turned around and told them to get out as quickly as possible.
She called her fiancé, telling him she had to evacuate and promising to call as soon as possible.
Ripkey and her co-workers began racing down the 33 flights of stairs. But when they got to the mezzanine level, security wouldn't let them leave.
“We’re all just standing there and all of a sudden the second plane hits,” she said. “It was like a scene out of a movie and all of the windows just shattered from the noise.”
The security guards realized something urgent was happening and allowed them to leave through the service entrance, Ripkey said.
At that point, she still did not know what had happened. Only when she got outside and turned around did she see the twin towers burning.
Ripkey then began making her way through the chaotic streets of New York as fast as she could. She borrowed a phone to let her fiancé know she’d made it out.
Moments later, while she was walking down the streets toward the ferries to see if she could get out of the city, Ripkey heard what she described as “a grumbling.”
“And we turn around and you can just see the towers just fall,” she said. “It was just surreal.”
Ripkey managed to escape with her life that day, and not much else.
When she eventually reunited with her fiancé, the two of them got in a car and drove as quickly as they could out of the state to her parents’ house in the Midwest.
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Life would eventually take Ripkey to Fort Mill five years ago. She, her husband, and their children settled down, calling South Carolina home.
But the trauma of that day haunted her for a long time, stretching from New York City.
“I would look up at the sky and envision planes exploding in the air,” she recalled.
And while Ripkey’s experience was harrowing, she knows she was one of the lucky ones.
“It’s not something I want to relive every day, but it’s something that I never want to forget,” she said.
Ripkey believes she was given the gift of life. She spends her days doing the things that matter most to her. She gave up her corporate job and now works as a photographer. She sits on the sidelines of her children’s soccer games. And she steps away from the negativity of life, something she's mastered over the last 20 years.
“It’s so much easier to hate than it is to take a step back understand people’s different experiences and perspectives,” Ripkey said.
In her own words, two decades went by in the blink of an eye. Ripkey hopes the grim milestone will serve as a reminder to people about the fragility of life.
“We all get to share this earth, this place for such a short period of time,” she said, surrounded by photographs in her little studio. “Why not have a little bit of grace, a little bit of empathy, a little bit of understanding, and let people live their life?”
Contact Tanya Mendis at tmendis@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.