I was sitting in a classroom of Saint Ignatius Loyola School on the Upper East Side of New York City. It was September 11th, 2001 and I was in the first grade. The lights had been turned off by the teacher and the whole room assumed a subtle blanket of silent darkness.
Over the announcement speaker our principal explained there had been an accident at the World Trade Center. A plane had flown into a tower.
Some parents were outside to pick students up early. The lucky ones got to go home.
My mother was waiting outside, 8 months pregnant with whom would be my little sister, pushing my pacifier-mouthed baby brother in a stroller. The bizarre trio, half on the pavement and half on the blacktop, stood naked in their uncertainty.
“I know why you’re here!” I sung out, thrilled to be out of school. “A plane is in the World Trade Center. So I get to go home.”
Imagine the 3,000 angels who lost their lives that day, saying those exact same words?
September 11th is a day that will never cool from my memory. It will always assume a specific chair at my mind’s round table. 15 years and the sting still infects the eyes, clogs my throat.
This September 11th, the day began dismal and gray with drizzle. But morning sunshine pushed back the clouds and we were blessed with a truly unparalleled day. Perchance this was God’s way of saying sorry in a soft token of empathy.
The original news reels, already 15 years old, show a world we will never know again. They are the same videos I now watch solitarily every year on YouTube: coverage from CNN, Fox, ABC and the likes. I see alarmed reporters, stunned as they broadcast quite literally breaking news unfolding, so unsure of what they are seeing. And yet, once the second plane hit, they unanimously confirmed America was under a national terrorist attack.
Tragedy does not strike alone; in her wake follows chaos that could last a lifetime. For those of us who grew up specifically in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, we have our stories. Almost everyone knows someone who had a parent that commuted into the city each day. We know the towns, the parishes, families, and friends who lost pieces of their heart in the rubble.
The people left behind carry the burden.
They shoulder the insurmountable weight of memory, of absence, of guilt, of vengeance, of pain.
My best friend’s grandmother once cried to her about her father, “He’s never been the same since 9/11. He’s a different person.” I think we all are. My father attended more funerals than I can count on all my fingers and toes. An entire generation was rocked off the hinges. America’s blissful innocence somehow lost.
But there is also such good to counter the so very, very bad. Stories of coworkers plunging through sheet-rock and clambering over barriers to help one another get out. Firefighters and policemen obliterating the blockages of escape routes. Fearless passengers determined to storm a hijacked captain’s cockpit.
The saying “Never Forget” should serve as a reminder to us all that, should we forget the important events and people which change our lives, we too will be forgotten. “Our” freedom is ours to borrow. The many generations who have fought to secure this freedom paid their dues, lending us the luxuries housed in our society. When we become the thankless receiver, the spoiled child, the America-haters, we are undone and unworthy of that freedom.
Try as I might to understand the events that happened that day, to come to terms with the ignoble means to such a tragic end, my amazement will never cap nor vanish. Each year the story is ever more laden with artifacts of similar, but so personalized, memories from that early September day.
And by God, it was a beautiful morning.
We are the minds that will remember. It is up to us to ensure we do right by our fellow Americans. 15 years is no time at all in the grand scheme of things. Let's make it past the next 50.
God bless America and God bless all the victims of September 11, 2001.
