Some mornings never let go of you. Today marks twenty-five years since September 11th, 2001.
I was home with my newborn son. My toddler daughter wanted her cartoons, so I turned on the television to find her a channel. Instead I found the news, and the first tower was already burning.
I called my dad right away. He worked for the state government at the time, and I needed to tell someone what I was seeing. I was still explaining it to him when he asked me a question I have never forgotten: “Do they think it was an accident?”
Before I could answer, the second plane crossed the screen and flew into the second tower. I cried out, “Oh my God, no.”
I was holding my son in one arm, watching history change in real time. My daughter was still waiting for her cartoons.
Twenty-five years is long enough that my daughter, a toddler that morning, has no memory of it at all. My son wasn’t even old enough to know his mother was crying. They have grown up entirely inside the world that day built, without ever knowing the world before it.
I remember it like it happened an hour ago. My dad’s voice on the phone. The particular kind of silence that followed the second impact, when it stopped being a terrible accident and became something else entirely.
Nearly 3,000 people went to work, boarded a flight, or answered a call for help that morning and never came home. Firefighters climbed the stairs while everyone else was running down them. And lets not forget that although this day tends to focus on the twin towers, there were others….Passengers on Flight 93 made a decision, together, to fight back. And 185 more lives were lost at the Pentagon.
My heart also breaks for those who were at these locations and saw it first hand. I know how this day impacted me watching from the safety of my home. I can only imagine what they are living with, experiencing it in real-time, up close and personal.
I don’t have a tidy lesson to offer about that day. Twenty-five years doesn’t make the losses smaller or easier to hold. It just changes who is left to carry the memory. That’s what today is for.