In the weeks and days before this anniversary, I found myself struggling with an inexplicable grief I couldn't quite place. With that grief was mingled a sense of guilt: I wasn't in New York; I lost no loved ones. But then I spoke to someone, and he put it into perspective for me.
"You were 18, and the world you grew up in changed overnight. You never got to experience a pre-9/11 world, and you're mourning that, and that's okay.
And he's right. When I wrote about the TSA changing rules to allow Pre-Check members to access the gate, it took me back to many days at Milwaukee's Mitchell Airport. My dad traveled a lot for work when I was a kid, and we'd drive him to the airport, walk him to his gate, and watch him leave. We'd repeat the process when he returned, and for a daddy's girl like me, watching him deboard the plane was a happy moment.
My children never knew that. When I travel, they leave me at the departures terminal, take my suitcase out of the trunk, and give me a quick hug. But those are the small things.
On September 11, 2001, I was 18 years old and a college freshman. That Tuesday morning, I was woken by my alarm clock, set to a local radio station. When it went off, I caught just a bit of what the DJ was saying before I hit the snooze button.
"And the top of the building was on fire?"
That was enough to pique my interest, so I got up and turned on our television. Was this a building in Milwaukee? My mom worked downtown, across from the Federal Building, and I worried about her safety. There was the North Tower, belching black smoke into the blue Manhattan sky.
"Was that an accident?" my roommate had woken up by that point and asked what was going on.
"I have no idea," I replied.
I had turned on the television in that short, 17-minute window between American Airlines Flight 11 hitting the North Tower and United Airlines Flight 175 hitting the South Tower.
We saw that live. I remember the hosts on television yelling out loud, and then a very pregnant pause.
"I saw that, and I don't have my glasses on," my roommate said. "This is bad."
Yet, for some reason, we went to class. It was constantly disrupted by students leaving — they had spouses, children, parents on flights. Other news came to us in bits and pieces.
"The Pentagon was hit ... "
"I heard another plane crashed ... "
"They could target us next ... "
That morning, the prevailing feeling was uncertainty. We didn't know what was going on. We didn't know there were four planes. We didn't know if there were more planes. We didn't know if there were going to be suicide bombers, car bombs, or other terrorist attacks. Would terrorists target campuses? Other businesses?
We never finished that class. A campus runner came and said classes were canceled. That's when I really began to panic, and I emailed my mother, imploring her to go home before I went back to my dorm room. There, my roommate was packing a bag. She was going to spend the night with family, knowing her relatives who were in the National Guard would likely be called up.
Then I got a phone call from a friend, also in the Guard, who said he was getting ready to go where needed.
"This is bad," he told me. "Stay alert."
That's when I started crying.
The door to my dorm room was open, and a girl walking past saw me in tears. She came in and sat cross-legged on the floor in silence. She wore red Converse high-tops, and her name was Cassie. Together, we sat there for a while in our shared shock and grief.
Eventually, I decided to go to my parents' house, where Mom tried to make things better by cooking a steak dinner. Later, she would tell me she didn't know what else to do. But as I left the dorm and walked to my car, I noticed a yellow taxi cab, driverless, sitting near the entrance. My entire body tensed because my mind believed it was going to blow up.
For years after the attack, I — who had never been on a plane at that point — would see an aircraft in the sky and wonder if it was supposed to be there.
In 2015, I finally got on a plane and went to New York to meet up with friends. On my first night in the city, I went to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. What stood out to me most was a giant wall, full of blue squares around a quote by Virgil:
"No day shall erase you from the memory of time."
That's what today is about. As I write this, I'm listening to C-SPAN, where the names of victims are being read out. So many names. So many lives lost. So many stories ended. On my phone, I have alarms set for the times the Towers collapse, so I can pause and remember.
And 25 years later, so many of us have forgotten the horrors of that day and how it forever changed our world. But I haven't. Perhaps it's because I've spent the past two weeks reading and writing about the American Heroes of 9/11, or maybe it's because my children ask questions about 9/11 and I answer them honestly. But whatever the reason, I will always remember today and the 3,000 people who died at the hands of Islamic terrorists who hate us.
May we all do the same.
