I was in third grade at P.S. 14 in Paterson, New Jersey, when my instructional aide, Nick, walked into the classroom to report what was unfolding. My teacher answered the phone to the news and, strangely, kept teaching. We didn’t get the ritual the rest of the country remembers — a television wheeled in on a cart, the room going quiet around it. In Paterson that morning, the emergency reached us through absence more than broadcast. Cell service was out. Landlines were spotty at best. Local television stations had gone dark because some of their antennas sat on top of the towers themselves. The catastrophe was reaching us through the gaps it had already torn open.
My aunt picked up my younger brother, then in first grade, and me around noon. In the car, she had a local news simulcast running through Z100, and I stayed glued to it — through the ride home and for several hours into the afternoon. I didn’t understand the scale of what had happened — not really — until I heard the panic breaking through the reporters’ voices on the radio. That was the moment it stopped being background noise and became something that had happened to my country, and to me, at eight years old.
At thirteen, someone put me onto Loose Change, the conspiracy documentary that, whatever its flaws, cracked something open in me. It gave me a thirst to understand what had actually happened that day, and that thirst has never gone dry. Every year since — without fail — I go looking for something new: unseen footage, a podcast interview with a survivor, a memoir I hadn’t read yet. 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers is one of several pieces of literature I’ve read on the subject, that one digitally. I know I will probably never arrive at a full accounting of it. I keep looking anyway, for whatever small clarity is still out there to find.
Twenty-five years on, that pull hasn’t loosened. I’ve watched nearly every piece of video I can find. I’ve sat through hours of airchecks — the actual radio broadcasts as they aired live that day — trying to hear, in real time, the moment ordinary programming turned into something else entirely.
We had school off on September 12th. Paterson sits about thirty-five minutes outside the city, close enough that there was real fear more attacks were coming, that nearby structures could be next. Nobody felt safe that day, or for a while after. I still remember that fear clearly, but I remember something else sitting right alongside it — a kind of community I hadn’t seen before and, at eight, didn’t yet have the words for. Trying to hold both of those at once is still hard.
So before more questions get asked, before more theories get spun up, before anyone dismisses this outright — and some of you are shallow enough to do exactly that — I’d ask you to sit with who this actually cost. Nearly three thousand people lost their lives that morning. Tens of millions more spent that day not knowing whether their own city or town might be next, or whether someone they loved was even still alive. And there is a second toll that gets talked about less: the people who went on, years later, to die from what they’d breathed in simply by being in the surrounding area, in all that debris. All of them deserve your attention today, even a quiet moment of it. We have not been the same country since — not culturally, not politically, not in how we treat each other as neighbors.
I keep finding footage I’ve never seen before, even now, twenty-five years in. Recently it was a documentary about bone fragments and human tissue recovered from the roof of a bank building near the towers.
In it, investigators explain that the pieces recovered were often too small to yield a positive DNA match — that on the floors closest to impact, people were essentially vaporized. Sitting with that fact has left me with a genuine, specific fear of structural fires. I wasn’t there. I only have the reporting, and the sound of it, and my own imagination filling in what it must have felt like — because if the pain of a kitchen burn reaches down to the bone, I can’t begin to estimate what that kind of heat did to a person. The sound of bodies hitting the pavement from that height. The collapse itself. The people found in the rubble, and the ones who survived that day only to lose years later to what was sitting in their lungs. Held together, the scale of it is close to unbearable, and that’s precisely why I can’t stop researching it — not because I expect to solve it, but because some part of me still believes there’s a little more understanding to be found if I keep looking. I’m not sure I’ve ever fully learned how to carry all of this.
The music from that period still does something to me, and probably always will. Enya’s “Only Time” got paired, over and over, with footage of families expressing raw grief for people they’d lost, or sitting with the agonizing uncertainty of not yet knowing. WKTU, Z100, and WPLJ had Enrique Iglesias’s “Hero” on rotation. I can still hear the Z100 DJs from that stretch — Rich Davis, part of Covino & Rich and the morning mess; Tim Romeo Herbster, who’d go on to host Most Requested Live; and Danielle Monaro (@radiodaniellemonaro), who was on the morning show then and, remarkably, is still on the air today with the Elvis Duran Morning Show, still taking calls and connecting with New Yorkers. Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” played on what felt like a loop, and for a couple of weeks, this country showed a version of itself I hadn’t seen before and haven’t fully seen since. Strangers helped strangers. People prayed next to people they’d never met. Small courtesies got extended freely, for a little while. It saddens me every time I think about it — that it took something this catastrophic to get people to treat each other that way. Kindness shouldn’t need a body count to justify itself.
So where does that leave me, twenty-five years later? Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever stop taking in whatever new piece of this surfaces, and I’ve made peace with the fact that I’ll never fully make sense of it — though I’ll admit that peace is its own kind of unsettling. What I’d ask, today of all days, is that you be a little more deliberate with your attention. Think about the people who didn’t survive it. Think about the families still carrying that grief a quarter-century later. Think about the first responders who might have to face something like this again, given how many enemies our government’s decisions abroad have made over the years. I’ve deliberately kept politics out of most of what I’ve written here, because some of what I’ve come to believe about who actually holds power in this country is hard for even me to fully reconcile. But I don’t think it’s a stretch to say we’re compromised in ways that touch our elections, our leaders, and our everyday lives — whether we clock it or not.
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