Were you alive when a certain tragic event happened? Where were you?

I've lived through too many to count.  I was at a high school assembly when this one occurred on 11/22/63.

I was walking to work along Sydney's Pitt Street when JFK was murdered. I didn't want to believe it.

9/11? I was sitting at my computer and STILL didn't want to believe it. This was an atrocity defying description: A testimony to religious hatred. Unbelievable.

I was on night shift and was able to watch the moon landing live on TV. We kept the kids home from school that day but they weren't really interested and none of them can now remember it.

When WWII ended I was only 8 but I remember all the trams, jam-packed with people who had been given the rest of the day off work. The trams were bedecked with toilet rolls (there were no gaily coloured streamers available in war time.)

Then there were the horror stories that followed the war: The holocaust and the escalation of the arms race following Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- but those things were ongoing and there was no particular time or place.

I saw the JFK shooting on TV, Kent State shootings, space shuttle explosion, 9/11 attacks, Boston marathon bombing, far too many tragedies.

I was at a Scout meeting when I heard JFK had been shot, I was at a barbecue on the beach at Ventura when the news came through that Princess Diana had died. I was working on a newspaper picture desk when pictures of 9-11 started coming through on the wires. I was on the first day of a new job when the Shuttle Challenger blew up. I was on the first day of a different new job when I learned my father had died. You DO remember where you were when disaster strikes.

But, on the flip side, I was in Berlin just after the wall came down, in Johannesberg in the weeks after Nelson Mandela was elected president. Not everything in life is tragic events.

I was a year old on 9/11 so I don't remember what I was doing myself. My mom told me what happened that day and how she reacted.

2011 Brisbane floods.  I was at home, about 30 minutes down the road from the Brisbane River, where the major flooding occurred.  That's just beginning to cover the Queensland natural disasters that I've been alive through.  Of course there's other events, but that's the one that stands out to me.

Too many to count. A few really stick out. Hurricane Andrew, the bombing  of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and 9/11.

With Hurricane Andrew the dept. Store I worked for had moved to a new location and we having a grand reopening sale. Originally the storm was forecasted to hit us but turned a couple of days before. This was good news bad news. We were safe, but our corporate headquarters in Miami was being evacuated. I was working the cash office/service desk. Our store set a record for the chain in sales in one day without any support from corporate. I didn't get to see the news until I got home that night about how bad the storm was and I am glad I had something to keep me busy, so I didn't have to watch hours and hours of the coverage. It was bad enough watching the days worth of coverage afterwards. I did go down through Homestead 3 years later and the amount of homes that still were damaged and left abandoned was just sad.

The day of the Oklahoma bombing I was off work that day, and decided not to go to the beach but instead organize signs for work. ( I was the head of the men's dept..) Watching the news was just scary and heart wrenching. I sat on my living room floor with sales signs all around me, crying watching children being pulled from the rubble. It still breaks my heart when I think of that day.

On 9/11 I was in another federal building training for a job with Social Security. Since we were in a classroom we had no idea what was going on until after the second plane had hit. We got online shortly before the first tower collapsed. My heart sank.