The courtyard was sunny, September light streaming golden through the leaves.
But as I blinked into the sun from the classroom dark, the dappled trees were not what I noticed. I only saw the students.
Each one standing alone. Each one holding a phone. Each one weeping.
With each step I took, confusion swirled. What is going on, and why is everyone outside, and why are they speaking English when we are supposed to practice our French all the time, and why on earth is everyone crying?
I followed a bewildered friend to the computer lab. We stepped into the silence of the packed room. Slowly pieces emerged as screens refreshed. Planes, towers, crashes.
Suddenly I realized why my classmates—half from Columbia, half from Barnard—were wailing in the courtyard.
Their parents were in those towers.
//
Hours later we stumbled out onto the street, bleary and bewildered. We decided to stop at a neighborhood café; we hadn’t eaten all day. For the first of countless times over the next weeks, the waiter greeted us not with Parisian indifference, but anguished concern: Were we ok? Were our families ok?
We nodded. Or we didn’t know.
What haunts me is not the lonely night I spent curled up next to the radio, trying to catch snatches of the BBC since the apartment had no TV or internet. Or the frantic voice of my sister in London when we finally got a phone connection through. Or the shocking photos plastered across every newspaper the next morning on the Metro.
It was the classmates from the courtyard.
The students who never came back to school.
The kids whose parents were in the towers.
//
For the first ten days of my semester in Paris, I wrote devotedly in my brand-new journal emblazoned with the Eiffel Tower.
New friends and new food and new places and a thousand eager possibilities, each page scrawled in half English, half French.
The last entry is dated Sept. 11, 2001. Early in the morning, before everything changed.
What else could be said?
The rest of the book is blank.
//
9/11 happened half my lifetime ago. I was twenty on that sunny September afternoon.
I went to bed that night overwhelmed by the loss, the thousands of hearts that had stopped that day and the thousands of broken hearts they left behind.
Twenty years later, it is this first encounter with the staggering scale of suffering that carved my life into another Before and After. The same overwhelm that sinks me to my knees when this country hits morbid milestone after milestone in the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of deaths rolling by unnoticed like miles on the odometer.
Today I walk out barefoot into the sun, miles away from the leaf-dappled courtyard. I wonder where those students are now, the ones who left, the ones who wept.
Who still weep.
Today is a morning bright and new. It is a mourning dark and deep.
Twenty is old enough to have seen some of the world. Twenty is young enough to be shocked by its horrors.
I stayed in France that semester. I tasted its beauty and marveled at its wonders. But the city is shadowed by grief. The bright and the dark, the chiaroscuro.
Our collective grief turns twenty today. How will we mark it?
Will we keep remembering, keep telling the stories, keep mourning the dead? Will we live changed, honoring each life lost, then and now?
Twenty is not so old. Twenty is much too young.
I was in downtown Washington D.C. twenty years ago today. I was 15 and on a family road trip. I could tell a lot of stories about that day, but the one I remember the most is actually from 9/12 - I came downstairs in my aunt's house to see my mother sitting at the table sobbing over the photos and stories in that day's Washington Post. I took the newspaper away from her, brought her some Kleenex, and gave her a hug. 9/11 will always remind me of the first time I mothered my mother.
My personal grief ritual for this day is to listen to two songs - Where Where You When the World Stopped Turning by Alan Jackson, and Grand Central Station by Mary Chapin Carpenter. MCC did an interview with Steve Inskeep of NPR about the writing of that song, the story of a man who is working at the Twin Towers site in the weeks after the collapse and how he feels like he brings the souls of those who died with him to the train station when he leaves every night. I always cry at the last lines of that song - "Tomorrow I'll be back there working on the pile / Going in and coming out single file / Before my job is done there's one more trip I'm making / to Grand Central Station."
Thank you for sharing. Beautifully written. Definitely too young. A mystic in Ireland for-told a big event would happen at the towers and this ended up bringing me on two pilgrimages to Ireland. Very fruitful- somehow God brings good out of evil. Bless you.