A slew of powerful tributes were shared on Wednesday to mark the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 people and injured thousands.
Country singer Trisha Yearwood reflected on the morning of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in an emotional Facebook post. She recalled where she was the morning the devastation occurred and her feelings about how the country responded to the tragedy.
She wrote that she was in Los Angeles sleeping and set to shoot a video that day when she received a call from her mother to tell her the news of the terrorist attacks.
"She sounded…different. I immediately knew something was wrong," Yearwood wrote about the phone call. "She said, 'We’re being attacked.' She was crying and frantic, and worried that the west coast was next."
(MORE: US marks 18th anniversary of 9/11 terrorist attacks)"I turned on the tv just in time to see the second plane hit," she continued. "It didn’t seem real."
She explained that her then-partner, who would become her husband, Garth Brooks, was in New York City at the time.
"It was Read Across America day and he was somewhere, in some building in Manhattan, reading to kids. I didn’t know where, but I knew he was THERE," she wrote.
Yearwood described that she spent "a couple of hours of frantically trying to reach him" until she found out he was OK.
Unable to process the events, she made arrangements to get home to Nashville. "We were all in shock and just really didn’t understand what was happening and why someone would do this," she continued.
"I remember in the days and weeks that followed…seeing all the footage, hearing the stories of bravery, watching first responders continue to dig and search for survivors," she wrote. "So many lives lost. So many rescuers killed in service."
The singer said she also saw people uniting as one. "Because at the end of the day, we are…one nation, under God, indivisible," she added.
"What I take from 9/11 is that when the worst happens, we can come together and be our best," she closed her note.
"My prayer today is that we remember the sacrifices of those who went to work that morning, never realizing they wouldn’t make it back home that night…that we remember the sacrifices of the first responders who lost their lives that day trying to help people get to safety…that we remember everyone who survived, but take the scars with them always…that we remember the families who lost everything that day…that we remember the men and women who bravely responded to the call and fought (and fight) to end terrorism all over the world."