I was reading my Penn Stater in bed and the Phillies/Mets game was on TV. The game was background noise, and then suddenly it wasn't. "We're receiving reports that Osama bin Laden has been killed."

I was watching NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams when Andrea Mitchell said a family member of a 9/11 victim had e-mailed producers and wrote, "It doesn't feel natural to celebrate a death, but tonight it feels natural."

I immediately thought of Susan Retik of Needham, Mass., the 9/11 widow who touched me with her incredible humanity. I wondered what she was thinking. Susan, who grew up in Cheltenham Township, was pregnant with her third child when her husband David was killed on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center.

Not long after, Susan and Patti Quigley co-founded Beyond the 11th, a nonprofit organization that empowers widows in Afghanistan who have been afflicted by war, terrorism and oppression.

I interviewed Susan in April 2008. She was remarried by then and had a fourth child. In addition to running a nonprofit that's had an enormous impact on women living on the other side of the world, she was focusing on her "new family unit." I could hear her kids in the background and I remember thinking how resilient and full of love this women had to be.

My phone conversation with Susan is one I won't forget. She shared with me her story, one of a 9/11 widow who ended up helping Afghan widows.

At the time of our interview Susan was gearing up to return home to Montgomery County for a fundraiser benefiting her organization that would feature a screening of the documentary, "Beyond Belief."

The film chronicles Susan and Patti's work and their time spent in Afghanistan in 2006. Susan said that trip took a lot of courage. It also taught her that halfway around the world, mothers want the same things for their children.

She told me of how she met David at Colgate University, they married, she worked until they had children and then stayed home to raise them.

"I was living such a good life, but a simple life," she said. "It was all about us in our little community right here."

That is, until David left home early in the morning to fly from Boston to Los Angeles for a business trip.

"After Sept. 11, I just felt a call to action. I didn't choose to have this voice, but I have it, and I feel like I need to use it," she said to me.

Susan called Afghan women "voiceless," adding, "The fall of the Taliban didn't mean women threw off their burqas and rejoiced in freedom. That couldn't be further from the truth. They enjoy very few freedoms."

She also mentioned to me that after a September 2006 TV interview she received a few nasty e-mails from people asking how she could help people in a country where al-Qaida was believed to have training camps.

Her TV appearance that sparked those hateful e-mails was on NBC Nightly News, the same program I was watching last night after news broke of bin Laden's capture and death.

In reference to the hate mail Susan said she'd accepted that she cannot change everyone's mind. "If you want to see hate, you'll see hate."

Last night I thought to myself, I'm sure she thinks this is a good thing, but something tells me Susan is not exactly reveling in the news of bin Laden's death.

When we spoke a few years ago she'd told me that Beyond the 11th means moving "beyond the hatred and the terror of that particular day, Sept. 11, and not get(ting) stuck there, not let(ting) terrorism win by retaliating with more hate.

"I believe in my heart of hearts the only way you see true change in a country like Afghanistan is through education."

I recently read that Susan was awarded the 2010 Presidential Citizens Medal, the nation's second-highest civilian honor. At the award ceremony President Obama said of her, "No one would have blamed Susan if she turned inward with grief or anger, but that's not who she is."