One of 2,996

I wasn't invited to be part of the 2,996 project - the project to ensure that some blogger, somewhere, wrote a memoriam to each of 9/11's victims (nobody ever invites me to be part of these things. I feel like I'm in high school again).

And I see that the woman who's assigned to write about the only 9/11 victim of whom I have any personal knowledge hasn't posted anything in over a month.

So if it please the court; I'll do a little something in memory of Ann Nicole Nelson, to my knowledge the only North Dakota native to die on 9/11.

A native of Stanley, North Dakota, Nelson went to Carlton College in Minnesota, and then worked for Dain Rauscher as a financial analyst in Minneapolis and Chicago before taking a job with Cantor Fitzgerald.

From the bio on Ann's memorial page:

She placed great value on education and believed that all the world was a classroom. This led her to travel throughout this country as well as many others. She loved and enjoyed people, embraced diversity, and felt that we all have much to learn from each other. Ann established college funds for many of her young relatives and friends. She attended Stanley Public School, Stanley, ND; Campus School in Minot, ND; Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam, WI; and Carleton College in Northfield, MN. She also studied at Cambridge in England and spent a semester on a study tour throughout China. She recently spent time in Peru, Norway, and Ireland.

Ann was born on Syttende Mai and loved to celebrate holidays and special occasions with her friends. her birthday party sometimes lasted for a week. Ann enjoyed all sports and participated in a variety of events including skiing, golf, tennis and soccer.

Dan Barry at the New York Times followed up with Ann's mother, and wrote a poignant, sometimes funny, often wrenching piece about Ann's mother, Jenette, opening Ann's laptop years after 9/11, and finding a list of Ann's personal goals.

11. Never be ashamed of who I am.

"Ann was in many environments where being a girl from North Dakota may not have been the most sophisticated label to wear," Mrs. Nelson says, recalling that her daughter had traveled to China and to Peru, and had worked in the high-powered environments of Chicago and New York.

Even so, Ann always conveyed pride in who she was, who her parents were and where they came from though never in a boastful way. "It's an important point about her personality," her mother says.

As a parent myself, this part killed me:

24. Remember birthdays!!!!

Birthdays loomed large in Ann's life. She would celebrate her birthday not for a day, but for a week in part because her father's birthday came the very next day, in part because she was proud to have been born on Norwegian Independence Day which is May 17, today.
"Ann would have been 35," says Mr. Nelson, who turns 65 tomorrow.

Her death Stanley, North Dakota hard. If America is the shining city on the hill, rural North Dakota is the room in the basement of a modest rambler in that shining city that nobody every gets down to. But Ann, by all accounts, was like a lot of us who fled the prairie for bigger, brighter, noisier places - but kept a big piece of it in her heart, and did everyone proud in the process.

Read the memorial page. Remember.

Posted by Mitch at September 11, 2006 08:23 AM | TrackBack