It may be hard to believe that 25 years have passed since that tragic morning on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Fresh out of high school, I remember that I already had a class at school at 9:30 in the morning. While I began to get ready, in the living room of the apartment where I lived with my family, people were discussing what was happening at the World Trade Center. The airplanes had already hit the Twin Towers in New York, and on television the images were replayed over and over, images that to this day continue to impact us and are etched in the memory of Americans.
Nothing was known, nor had a conclusion been given, but there was talk that it was an attack; still, we did not know what would happen and had no idea how, starting that morning, the life of an entire country would change.
I remember heading to school and arriving in my class where we talked about it; back then there were no social networks, nor phones with internet, so we stayed in the classroom discussing only what we had seen that morning. I recall the English teacher saying it was a very tragic event and would become part of history. She even told us that when we remember that date, we would recall in detail everything we were doing that morning, that such situations stay engraved in memory. She said she remembered the day Kennedy was assassinated and spoke with much detail about how that day was for her and her family.
Today, a quarter of a century later, I see what Ms. Lee was talking about; as I sit down to write this, I remember the course of that morning and how, in the middle of class, the school closed and we were told to go home, and through the news reports we watched how the situation unfolded, the tragedy that came to transform the world.
It will be a morning that those of us who were here in this country will not forget, and year after year we will continue to remember and relive it just as we saw it on the first day.
If that is how I feel, I can imagine how the families of the victims, of the firefighters and police officers who died, of those who lost parents, children, brothers, friends and acquaintances, will feel. Each year they have to relive the pain of loss and the helplessness before the attacks.
Years later, I had the opportunity to visit the site where the attack occurred; the new tower was still under construction and we could explore the surroundings, even visit St. Paul’s Chapel, one of the oldest surviving churches in Manhattan, which endured the collapse of the towers and served as a refuge that day.
There, among photos of the victims and objects, one can feel that energy that can only be perceived where such events have occurred, a sadness that seeps in and makes tears roll. There one understands the magnitude of this tragedy, there one feels the pain and moves beyond the images we can see on the screen.
That is why, on this 25th anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers, we remember all the deceased and their families and a country that came together to move forward.
