Judy Cobden grew up in Warwick. She attended Pilgrim, where she was a standout athlete playing softball, field hockey, and skating for the state’s only girls’ hockey team. She’s traveled the world, and as an investigator for the American Stock Exchange she’s had to deal with a lot of people in some tough situations.

On Friday morning, standing in front of more than 300 John Wickes School students, she felt uneasy. She was starting to shake. It wasn’t stage fright, although this was her first time addressing such a large audience. She knows the feeling. It has happened before, and it can come on suddenly and unexpectedly – brought about by the acrid smell of burning plastic and chemicals, or a bang like the popping of a balloon.

It’s then that the horror of that bright, sunny Tuesday September morning in the heart of the financial district of Manhattan – “the most horrible day in my life” – comes flooding back. Cobden would be talking to a generation that has heard of 9/11 and maybe seen video of one burning World Trade Center tower as an aircraft flies into the second tower and erupts into a fireball. They didn’t live it.

What could she say to them, as the school observed the 15th anniversary of a day that has dramatically altered world events? She didn’t want to relate her personal experience, as she did for a reporter after the students filed back to their classrooms. That would be too horrifying, maybe even the cause for nightmares. Yet, she wanted the children to understand the importance of the day and to take away a message.

“I saw the building on fire and I thought it was an accident,” she told the children standing in the hot morning sun in front of the school. Some shielded their eyes from the bright light to see her; others fidgeted.

Cobden didn’t go into the details of how she left her home in Brooklyn and was reporting for work at the exchange in the shadow of the World Trade Center, or the hours that followed when the crash of the second plane shook the ground like an earthquake, windows blew out, a firestorm engulfed the towers, and she lost 13 of her co-workers. Nor did she describe the sound of wrenching steel and falling concrete that blocked escape from the back of the exchange. There was confusion. No one knew if this was the start of other attacks, whether the fires and destruction could trigger gas explosions, or what was happening in other parts of the city, much less the world. Were they safer staying where they were, although nearby buildings were crumbling and they could see the horror of people seeking to flee and first responders racing to save lives?

The fear was that closure of the exchange would have a ripple effect across the world financial markets. As it was, there was panic in the markets, but it would have been far greater had exchanges not opened reasonably soon after the attacks. Yet, there was no way it could open. Operations were transferred to Philadelphia, and, remarkably, Cobden and many of her co-workers were back at work within less than a week.

“It sounds fictional and it’s not,” she said once the kids were back in school.

She paused, replaying the scene in her mind as she has done so many times. She described the streets filled with a fine ash so slippery that people fleeing ground zero just left their shoes and ran in their stockings and bare feet. Cobden believes her troubling feet – she’d had surgery – may have actually saved her. Her doctor had advised her not to wear heels and prescribed sneakers. She was wearing them and she was able to walk home, a seven-mile trek that took her across the Brooklyn Bridge where traffic was at a standstill and people walked between the stopped vehicles to cross. When she arrived home she was unrecognizable, covered by ash. For months afterward she was pulling specks of glass from her skin.

“I still have those shoes and will never throw them out,” she said. She was wearing them Sunday when she was the featured speaker at a 9/11 service held at the Oakland Beach memorial for the three Warwick residents lost in the attacks.

The days and weeks following the attacks took their toll. On first making contact with her supervisor and co-workers, she realized they thought she had been lost. As crews came together, work resumed, but all around them were the effects of the attacks.

She took the subway as far as a secured perimeter at ground zero and then walked the rest of the way to the office accompanied by an armed guard. They weren’t permitted to leave the building. Meals were delivered. To and from work, they were constantly reminded of the destruction and loss of life. Crews looked for bodies; the air was thick. Cobden said she suffered from respiratory conditions that persist to today. They could hear the rumbling as debris was cleared and sections of buildings crumbled, a constant reminder of the terror of 9/11.

As recently as six or seven years ago, she thought she had a pimple on her face, only to find it was a tiny speck of glass coming to the surface of her skin after all these years.

She talked about the scene and how people came together following the attacks at Sunday’s service in Oakland Beach (her remarks are printed in full on page 9), but not to the children. Rather, she said the day changed her outlook on life.

“I’m thankful every day I wake up,” she said.

She asked children to be respectful and understanding of each other and those they may not understand.

“Just because somebody is different doesn’t mean they are bad,” she said. “I would like to see everybody live in peace.”