It is September 11, 2026. Twenty-five years since the horrible events that took place in New York, Virginia and a field in Pennsylvania, but on this day it always feels like it happened ten minutes ago. In many ways the feelings I have on 9/11 mirror those I have on Isabella’s Day……the anniversary of the day my daughter left this earth. Very different scenarios but very similar in that I can never get through either day without tears.
Early this morning I was watching a special produced by Major League Baseball titled When America Took The Field. It has all the footage I have seen many times before. It brought back the tears yet again.
I was in Southern California that morning, at work early the way I always am. As I was walking into the office my Mom called frantic and I had to calm her down to understand what was wrong. I traveled a lot more back then. She was worried but I was safe. I then ran into the office. Everyone ended up standing around the one television that was there. The finance people. The admin people. The warehouse people. Groups that did not always stand side by side, all in the same spot, not a dry eye among us.
Then fear started to settle in. New York is a major city. So is Los Angeles. We did not know if or what might be headed our way. Because of the uncertainty, we started to call loved ones in case we would not have another chance to say goodbye.
I have never really been able to do these feelings justice for my children.
They know what they know from history books. The timeline. The flights. The towers. The number of people who lost their lives that day. The number of people who survived but would never be the same. All of that is true but none of it can carry what the morning actually felt like. History can give you the facts. It cannot give you the feeling of standing in a warehouse in California before most of the state was awake, calling the people you love to tell them so……just in case.
I have been trying to record an audio message to my kids off at college today. I have started it about a dozen times. I keep failing. I keep deleting it and I think I know why. I keep trying to say something adequate……to do justice to the day. The problem is nothing is really ever going to be adequate to it.
September 11 sits in me the way August 1 does.
These are obviously very different events. I would never suggest otherwise. One is a very personal and private loss that broke me. It belongs to me and my family. The other belongs to the entire country. The sadness though behaves in a similar fashion. It arrives one day a year and it does not get any softer as years go by. Sadness comes whether or not I have decided to feel it. And when that sadness comes, it is not a memory……it is happening again. Not twenty-five years ago as with 9/11. Ten minutes ago.
Anyone who has lost someone very important to them knows exactly what I am describing.
The mantra I live with came to me later, after both of these events. Isabella taught it to me. She did a lot for me, especially for someone who never uttered a word or took a step. This mantra applies to September 11 too and it explains the time after the horrible events.
Blessings Come From the Worst of Times.
Look at what happened to the country and the world after that day. It was incredible. Strangers checked on strangers. The lines that normally divide us went faint and, at least for a while, completely disappeared. People who had little in common stood in the same room and cried together about the same thing. This was true of the world as well. I was in Italy on the first anniversary of 9/11 and my wife and I spent hours trying to get to the beach. After trains and walking a long way, we rounded a corner to an Italian group marching toward the pier to honor the event. Thousands of miles from home, people came together to remember.
It took one of the worst days in modern American history to get us there.
But, most importantly, it got us there.
That is the part I hold onto and the part I pray others will remember. September 11 proved what we are capable of. Not in theory. We did it. Millions of us, at the same time, without anyone organizing it to make it happen.
We forget this is available to us. We act as though divisiveness and hate are permanent and that unity is the rare exception. September 11 proves otherwise.
I am grateful my children do not intimately know what that day felt like. That might be a strange thing to be grateful for because I also want them to understand it. But I would not trade their not knowing for anything in this world.
Maybe that is why I keep trying to record my thoughts for them, and why those thoughts became this post instead. So they can have the understanding without having had the morning.
Twenty-five years today.
Christopher
