Twenty-five years later, I still remember the beautiful morning, the burning towers, the strangers, the children, the smell, the silence—and the people who refused to stop looking for the lost.
I Will Never Forget: September 11, 2001
Twenty-five years later, I can still remember exactly how beautiful that morning was.
It was bright. Clear. Sunny. Almost impossibly beautiful.
I had just taken the PATH train into Manhattan from Hoboken. Most mornings, I would get off at 9th Street and 6th Avenue and walk to work. But that morning I had ridden my bicycle from Jersey City Heights down to Hoboken before getting on the train. I was early.
My boyfriend, Patrick, was late.
He had left after me.
It was the first day of gymnastics classes after summer break. Patrick worked near the World Trade Center for the National Council for Research on Women. He took the World Trade Center PATH train from Hoboken every morning. I had no idea how important those two little facts would become.
I got off the train and started walking toward work. When I reached Fifth Avenue, I noticed something strange.
People were standing in the street.
They weren’t talking. They weren’t moving.
They were just staring.
I looked down the avenue and saw a huge building burning.
I didn’t immediately understand what I was looking at. I asked a woman standing in the middle of Fifth Avenue, “Why is that building on fire?”
She didn’t even look at me.
She just stared at the building and said, “I don’t know.”
I asked, “Well, what happened?”
And she said, “I just saw a plane fly into that building.”
I remember saying, “What do you mean? Was it flying too low? I don’t understand.”
She said, “I don’t know. But that’s what I saw.”
A man came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder.
“What’s going on?”
I told him what the woman had said.
He asked, “How?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s just what she told me.”
We stood there together, staring.
Even then, it hadn’t completely registered that we were looking at the Twin Towers.
And then, for some reason I still can’t explain, I turned to this complete stranger and said:
“Will you walk me to work?”
His name was Kevin.
He said yes.
We had barely crossed Fifth Avenue when we heard something.
We looked up.
The South Tower was burning too.
That was the moment it became real.
We walked toward West Broadway together. Eventually Kevin went one direction and I went another, toward Cooper Union and the gymnastics gym where I worked.
I ran the rest of the way.
When I got there, everyone was talking.
The owner and our maintenance man, Valdi, were in the office watching the television. There were enormous windows in our gym, and from those windows we could see downtown.
We were supposed to have baby gymnastics classes that morning.
And somehow, we still did.
I was desperately trying to reach Patrick.
We didn’t have cell phones.
I called our apartment. No answer.
I tried our voicemail—a 212 number we’d paid for because, back then, having a 212 number made you sound like you actually lived in Manhattan.
Nothing.
I called Patrick’s office.
A woman who knew me answered.
“Has Patrick gotten into work yet?”
“No.”
Her voice sounded strange.
Dazed.
I asked her how she was doing.
She said, “It’s like a ticker-tape parade down here.”
Only it wasn’t a parade.
Paper was everywhere—documents, Post-it notes, office papers—floating through the streets after the impact.
Patrick wasn’t there.
Then I called my mother in Pennsylvania.
She had left a frantic message on our answering machine asking if I knew what was happening in New York. She didn’t even realize I was in New York.
I told her I couldn’t reach Patrick.
I didn’t know what to do.
She told me to calm down. She told me everything would be okay.
My mother was trying to make sense of something none of us could understand.
We told each other we loved each other.
Then we hung up.
I had to go teach.
So I set up for baby gym.
Two children showed up.
Two.
And there was something surreal about it. New Yorkers were trying to continue their day. We were going to have gymnastics class because, somehow, that was what we were supposed to do.
Nothing was normal.
Nothing would ever be normal again.
One of my coworkers said he thought it was Bin Laden.
I remember thinking that was an incredibly strange thing to say.
How could he possibly know?
And yet, he was right.
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum records that nineteen terrorists associated with al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airplanes that morning. Two struck the Twin Towers, one struck the Pentagon, and passengers aboard Flight 93 fought back before the plane crashed in Pennsylvania. 2,977 people were killed.
But I didn’t know all of that yet.
I was just trying to find Patrick.
Eventually, Patrick came to the gym.
I was so relieved to see him.
He had tried to come into Manhattan because he knew I was there and didn’t want to be stranded in New Jersey. Fortunately, the World Trade Center PATH trains were no longer running. He took the PATH toward 33rd Street instead.
On that train, people were already exchanging rumors.
One of them was that planes painted black had flown into the World Trade Center.
It sounds bizarre now.
But that was the morning.
Nobody knew what was happening.
Rumors traveled faster than facts.
We didn’t have smartphones. We didn’t have social media. We couldn’t instantly verify anything.
We just stood there and tried to understand.
Later, we watched the towers collapse.
And I remember the words of the children’s song we were singing.
“Ring around the rosie…”
We were playing with the parachute.
Then:
“We all fall down.”
The towers were falling at almost exactly the same time.
I remember running to the windows.
I remember watching.
And I remember my stomach dropping because I knew people were inside those buildings.
People were trapped.
People were jumping.
People were making impossible choices.
There are images from that day that no human being should ever have to see.
But I saw them.
We all did.
We closed the gym later that morning.
The Pentagon had been hit. Flight 93 had gone down in Pennsylvania. Manhattan was effectively shutting down.
There were no normal ways home.
People were walking north.
If they had been below 14th Street, they were walking.
And I remember the people coming toward us covered in dust.
Their shoes were covered.
Their clothes were covered.
Their faces were covered.
They looked like they had walked out of another world.
We eventually made our way to a friend’s apartment and waited until we could take a ferry back to Hoboken.
People were drinking martinis in the morning.
Women were shopping for shoes.
People were doing ordinary things in the middle of an extraordinary nightmare.
I remember thinking:
What are you doing?
But maybe that was how people coped.
Maybe everyone needed to do something ordinary because the alternative was to completely fall apart.
Then we got on the ferry.
And I’ll never forget an older man sitting there with his head down.
He kept shaking his head.
Over and over.
And finally he said:
“Not in my lifetime. Not in my lifetime. Not in my lifetime.”
I’ve never forgotten him.
The sky that evening was one of the most beautiful and horrifying things I’ve ever seen.
Smoke filled the sky over Manhattan.
It looked almost like a Van Gogh painting.
Beautiful.
Tragic.
Eerie.
Horrific.
And then there was the smell.
For weeks.
The smell of burned fuel.
Metal.
Smoke.
Something I can only describe as the smell of death.
I could smell it in the staff bathroom at the gymnastics gym.
It stayed.
The missing posters stayed too.
They were everywhere.
Smiling faces.
People’s mothers.
People’s fathers.
People’s husbands and wives.
People’s sons and daughters.
Faces of people whose families were still desperately hoping they might somehow be alive.
And then there were the children.
I had children at gymnastics who lost parents.
One little girl named Delaney was only about four.
One day she wouldn’t come out of one of those long blue gymnastics tunnels.
So I crawled inside with her.
She was sitting there quietly.
I asked her:
“What’s the matter, Delaney?”
She said:
“I’m thinking about my daddy.”
I asked her about him.
She told me:
“My daddy was in a big tower, and the tower fell down on him, and now he’s in heaven.”
I will never forget those words.
Twenty-five years later, they still break my heart.
A four-year-old shouldn’t have to understand what a terrorist attack is.
She shouldn’t have to understand that her daddy isn’t coming home.
But she did.
And she wasn’t the only child.
In the weeks afterward, I would go down toward the West Side Highway.
I would stand there with an American flag.
I would wave to the EMTs, firefighters, police officers, medical workers and rescue crews.
They were still digging.
They were still looking.
We knew what the odds were.
But they kept looking.
And the faces of those people are something I will never forget.
They looked exhausted beyond exhaustion.
And yet they kept going.
Something else happened in New York during those weeks.
People looked at each other.
People said hello.
People helped one another.
People displayed American flags.
There was a feeling of unity that I had never experienced in New York City before.
For a brief moment, we remembered that we were Americans before we were Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or liberals, rich or poor, black or white, religious or nonreligious.
We were Americans.
And we were hurting together.
Today, one of the things that troubles me most is how far removed some people are from that day.
There are young adults today who weren’t born yet.
There are children who know September 11 only as something they read about in a textbook.
For them, the Twin Towers are history.
For me, they are memory.
I remember the morning.
I remember the woman on Fifth Avenue.
I remember Kevin.
I remember trying to reach Patrick.
I remember the children.
I remember Delaney.
I remember the people covered in dust.
I remember the ferry.
I remember that old man saying, “Not in my lifetime.”
And I remember the smell.
I remember the sky.
I remember watching the towers fall.
I remember the people who jumped.
I remember.
And because I remember, I feel a responsibility to tell the truth about what happened.
The attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda, an Islamist extremist organization. That is a historical fact. But remembering 9/11 also means being precise: Islamist extremism should not be confused with Muslims generally. The 9/11 Memorial itself makes that distinction.
What I will never accept is the idea that Americans deserved September 11.
We did not.
The people who went to work that morning did not deserve it.
The firefighters who ran into those buildings did not deserve it.
The people on the airplanes did not deserve it.
The people who jumped from the towers did not deserve it.
The children who lost their mothers and fathers did not deserve it.
Nobody deserved it.
And I don’t care how much time passes.
I will never forget.
I will never forget the people who died.
I will never forget the people who survived.
I will never forget the first responders.
I will never forget the families.
I will never forget the children.
I will never forget the strangers who helped strangers.
I will never forget the missing person signs everywhere.
I will never forget the people who jumped to their death.
I will never forget the American flags.
I will never forget that, for a brief moment, we remembered what it meant to be Americans together.
And I will never forget that beautiful September morning in New York City.
It began with sunshine.
It ended in smoke.
And twenty-five years later, I can still see it.
September 11, 2001.
Never forget. 🇺🇸
The 9/11 Memorial’s official timeline confirms the key sequence that morning: the North Tower was struck at 8:46 a.m., the South Tower at 9:03, the South Tower collapsed at 9:59, Flight 93 crashed at 10:03, and the North Tower collapsed at 10:28.
NEVER FORGET AND TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT THIS DAY TO THOSE WHO DO NOT KNOW !!!
