I grew up watching the World Trade Center rise, but us kids never called it that. To us, they were the Twin Towers. I watched them climb skyward in that burnt orange iron inner façade that defined a childhood, when New York felt endless and everything seemed constructed to last.
Read more The real reason US life expectancy declined in 2020 and 2021
The Empire State Building, completed in 1931, ruled the cityscape as the world’s tallest building for four decades, however it was in 1973 the Towers redefined Manhattan’s imposing skyline. A friend’s dad was on the job helping build what would become the tallest buildings on Earth, and gave us boys hard hats with the tower’s logo front and center.
The Empire State Building symbolized the city’s early ambition; while the Towers were their contemporary stretch. Those Towers were not just modern architecture, they were identity. They were permanence.
Then, on a single morning, they were gone.
The Fire Department (FDNY) still features the Towers. FDNY’s culture and iconography after 9/11 are still deeply tied to the Towers. You see them on FDNY EMS patches and station house logos throughout Gotham’s five boroughs.
Twenty-five years later, oceans of ink have been spilled about that fateful day when the Towers were no more and it never seemed like enough, especially to one native son. It wasn’t until the last minute that I decided, for posterity’s sake, to write a column reflecting on this day that also coincided with my mother dying from cancer, who would pass shortly thereafter.
I don’t think 9/11 resonated with her being so ill, but I do know the closest she ever got to an airplane was having lunch with her girlfriends at Windows of the World atop of the North Tower. She was one Brooklyn gal who in no way requested a window seat.
Read more Guess who is walking around with those US weapons?
There are moments when history does not merely happen around us; it enters the house and parks itself at the head of the table. September 11, 2001, was not only the month America lost its sense of invulnerability, but it was also the time where I lost the most influential woman in my life.
Grief has a way of withering the world.
My wife is experiencing this as her mother passed last month.
Terminal illness reduces life to hospice care, whispered updates and the never-ending tick of time. Then came September 11 and the whole country was pulled into that same hospice room.
Everyone was hoping for miracles.
The Towers seemed eternal.
Mothers do, too.
That is what makes the memory so hard to separate. The national wound and personal wound blend together. We all mourned the 2,977 victims. I also mourned my mom, whose own battle with cancer had taught me how life can quickly change without permission and without warning.
Some losses are never replaced.
They are carried and endured.
We learn to live around them, but we never outgrow them.
September 11, 2001, changed America.
Losing my mother changed me.
Together they marked the end of one world and the beginning of another.
It was where innocence was lost, memory became sacred and nothing constructed by humankind or held by the human heart could ever again be mistaken for indestructible.
Read more An ode to communism?
Image generated by ChatGPT.