25 Years of Reflecting on September 11

I will never get past what happened on September 11, and I believe none of us who were in New York that day ever will. If we were trees cut down after a century of life, and a tree expert opened their trunks to reveal the inner rings, he would find among them a darker, denser ring, full of the marks of trauma, and ask, “What happened here?” We would answer, “That was September 11.” And he would understand, because he had seen such rings before.

Twenty-five years have now passed. This may be the last time I write about that day. But last week I revisited what I had written about it over the years, and I discovered how many ideas and emotions I had gone through, and how my readers and I had tried together to make sense of what had happened.

In the first year, my focus was on the details of the city in the aftermath of the catastrophe: its sounds, its scenes, and the changing contours of its landscape. Just two days after the attacks, before they had a clear name, I wrote that Americans were facing the end of an old illusion: the belief that power, wealth, and status could protect us from history. Suddenly, history knocked on our door.

I also wrote about the return of religion and faith to the public sphere, and about the 343 firefighters who lost their lives in New York. I received photos of an article I had written about their courage, displayed on the walls of fire stations. In those days, I also felt that a certain kind of masculinity and courage, which we had thought had receded, were reemerging.

On the first anniversary, I wrote about St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, where doctors and nurses waited for the injured to arrive. But the injured did not come in large numbers, because three thousand people had died. They were no longer bodies that could be saved; they had turned to dust in the air, and we had inhaled it.

On the fifth anniversary, I did not focus on images of the towers collapsing, but on the sounds of that day, particularly recordings of the last phone calls. Courage, in one of its aspects, is the ability to recognize the reality of one’s situation as it is, however harsh.

On the tenth anniversary, I wrote about what we owe the dead: memory. What shocked New York most was that the buildings themselves fell before our eyes. The Twin Towers had stood tall and strong, then suddenly collapsed, turning into a cloud of dust. The mind could not grasp that buildings of such magnitude could simply vanish. From that day on, a profound psychological shift occurred in the city: we moved from the sense of being “safe” to the realization that we were “not safe.” That marked the end of the image of an impenetrable America, and the beginning of an era of fragility.

On the fifteenth anniversary, I wrote about Will Crother, the young man known as the “Man in the Red Scarf,” in tribute to his courage in saving others.

But what I return to most today is the voice of my son, who was fourteen years old on the day of the attacks, and on his second day at a new school on the other side of the river. Phone lines were down, and I could not reach him. That evening, he called from a public phone in Brooklyn, while a line of students waited their turn.

He reassured me that he was fine, and asked me, “What do we actually know?” I told him what had happened, and then realized he was relaying the information I was giving to the students standing behind him. His voice, at fourteen, sounded older than his years and more confident. I realized then that conveying information to others could be a form of taking responsibility. I did not know at the time that this would have an impact on his future career, but it did.

My son did not return home that night. The following morning, he came back to Manhattan on a subway train that took a winding route. As the train emerged from the tunnel and began heading north, the passengers, as was customary, glanced briefly to the left to see the Twin Towers and the glitter of the city skyline in the sunlight. But that morning, they did not see the towers; instead, they saw a cloud of debris in their place.

A single, faint sound rose from the entire car—a collective sigh, as if everyone had said at the same moment, “Oh…” There was a large man, who appeared to be a union worker, standing and looking like everyone else, then he sat down and began to weep.

That reminded me of what happened at the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1913. The veteran soldiers who had fought in the battle, now in their seventies and eighties, attended the commemoration. When the Confederates reenacted their famous attack, the Union soldiers let out a collective sound of shock and sorrow. For them, it was no longer merely history; it was a human tragedy. As the former adversaries approached one another, they could not reenact their defeat; instead, they embraced each other.

That is how I feel today, twenty-five years later, whenever I hear stories about September 11 and about the brave people who lived through that day.

Life goes on. My son has become a father and is expecting a second child, and days pass, filled with life. But never lie about the things that break your hearts.

I will never get over September 11, nor do I think any of us will. That dark ring will remain etched into the trunk of our inner tree. From time to time, someone will ask, “What happened there?” And we will tell them.