Twenty-five years ago today, I was at my desk at a web design agency in Florida. I remember the sound of my coworker crying out from her office down the hall, where she had a small TV tuned to the morning news. By the time I got to her doorway, the first tower was already burning.
None of us understood yet what we were watching. We just knew something had gone terribly wrong, and then, live, watched it go more wrong. I don’t think anyone in that office got much work done for the rest of that day, or for a lot of the days after.
I imagine most people reading this have a version of that same memory — where they were, who told them, what the room sounded like. Twenty-five years is long enough that some of you weren’t born to see it happen, and long enough that it’s worth saying plainly: we still remember. Almost 3,000 people didn’t come home that day, and the people who loved them have carried that every year since.
Anniversaries like this one have a way of pulling other losses into focus too — the ones that had nothing to do with that day, but that left the same kind of hole. I think about my sister-in-law, Solange Pendas, who we lost suddenly to a brain hemorrhage. I think about my friend Marcia Ente, who passed away from a heart attack far too young. Neither loss made the news. Both mattered just as much to the people who loved them.
That’s really what a day like today is for, I think — not just marking a historical event, but making space to remember the people we’ve lost, however we lost them. The tragedy of September 11th and the quieter grief of losing someone to illness or a sudden medical event aren’t the same thing, but they ask the same thing of the people left behind: to keep carrying the people who are gone.
Who are you thinking about today? Leave a comment, or just take a moment, wherever you are, to remember them.
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