ON THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF SEPTEMBER 11TH

by Mary Alexandra Stiefvater

The chill of September has rolled in.  It’s colder this year than it normally is.  It’s been 25 years.  A quarter of a human life.  It’s hard to believe so much time has passed since that consequential day.

It was a beautiful morning in New York City; the sun was shining.  It was warm.  It was everything that you could have dreamed a late summer day could be…until it wasn’t.

I’ve been thinking about this anniversary for a while.  About the profound losses of that day…about the profound losses in the years that followed.  It changed us.  It changed the world.

Every September, I still remember what it felt like.  It is still there, all of it, sitting quietly in my subconscious until the ninth month rolls in.  I’m still called back to that morning.  The temperature.  The bustle of the Village.  My clothing.  The way the sun felt on my face.  The shock and then disbelief.

It seems odd that there are generations of people who have no visceral memory of that day.  They only know what they read in books or were told by family members.

I imagine that’s what it must have felt like to those that experienced the day President John F. Kennedy died; the chaos, the confusion, the questions that followed…a veil of safety was pierced that day in Dallas.  My mother could remember everything that she was wearing on that fateful day; what the temperature felt like, where she was, where she was going when she heard the news on the radio.

Now I have that same type of imprinted memory of September 11, 2001.  I still remember tiny details about that day, even as we come to this quarter century mark.

I think about the generations of people who have no idea of some of the subtle things we lost because of the repercussions of that day.  Like there was a time when your family could walk you to your boarding gate and wave to you as you departed.  They could be there to greet you with flowers and balloons the minute you stepped off the gangway.  Those things don’t exist anymore because of what happened on September 11.  The world is a really different place a quarter of a century later because a veil of safety was pierced at 8:46 am.

But one thing I will never forget about that day in 2001 was the unity, kindness and care we took with each other.   There was genuine compassion and concern for our fellow man in those hours, days, weeks and months that followed.  

It took time to process the events of that day.  And then it took time to heal.  It took years in fact,  but each year it got a little easier.  It doesn’t hurt as much as it did.  You don’t forget, you just somehow move forward.

I hope that on this anniversary and every one that follows the same message rings as true today as it did then, United We Stand. We Will Never Forget…That there’s more good than evil. That there’s more kindness than spitefulness.  And that we will help carry each other, step-by-step, into the future, however uncertain it is or however scared we may feel. 

I will never forget the love and kindness that came from all corners of the globe after the events of 9/11.  And I think about all of the good people on this planet that care about making it better and work for it to be a better world every single day.  

Let that be the true legacy of September 11.