Remembering 9/11 Twenty-five Years Later

That day was like any other, and I remember it being the perfect weather—sunny and pleasant. As I walked out of the subway towards my job, I saw someone standing on a fire escape staring downtown, and then I noticed that many people were staring in the same direction. I rushed to see what it was, and then I saw the smoke coming out of the first tower that had been hit. I rushed to a pay phone to call my job, at the time I worked for the photo news agency Sygma, and I wanted to alert them to what was happening. When I received no answer, I realized they were already working on it. At this point in time, I had no idea what had happened. As I continued to walk towards my job, I could hear someone’s handheld radio talking about a plane hitting the tower. Now I had some information, but what was going on was not clear. At work we had several television screens on playing the news details as they came in. The windows at work faced the Twin Towers, and we watched; by this time the second tower was also hit. There were already photographs coming to us from our photographers of firefighters helping people who were being brought down from the towers.

We watched as we saw one tower collapse before our eyes, and I knew at that moment I had just watched thousands of people die. The thought was devastating, and then the second tower went down, and my heart sank even deeper into my chest. I wasn’t disconnected from what I was seeing, and I was heartbroken. We still at this point did not know if there would be further attacks, and my boss at the time didn’t want me to go to my son’s school to pick him up. I had called the school, and they said they were letting parents pick up the children. His school was within walking distance from my job, and I rushed to get him. All the while I was worrying about what was going to happen and what I would say to him to make him feel reassured while also being honest with him. My son informed me that one of the children had told his class what had happened. I said this was true: a plane was deliberately flown into the tower. We didn’t know more yet, but we were together, and that’s what mattered.

The days that ensued were extremely difficult because there was a thickness in the air when I went to work. It was a collective grief that I could feel, and it was a struggle to walk through it. There were photos of people on subway walls and on fences saying that they were missing. Every face, every soul I felt in my heart. I don’t know if I cried. I believe the grief and shock were too deep. I remember watching a television program about angels late at night saying there was a photographer that had gone down 9/11 and there was a man playing a horn in the middle of the wreckage that had a beautiful sound, and he tried photographing him, and there was another photographer standing there who turned to him and said, "Don't bother; I already tried, and neither of my cameras will work.” I have no idea if this story was true, but it gave me great comfort. Later, I came to know this kind of thing can happen when I had tried but could not photograph someone dressed as Jesus carrying the cross in the Holy Procession of the Stations of the Cross in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn.

On the first-year anniversary and for years to follow, I would feel a heaviness, and then I would be alerted by writing something for work that it was September 11th, and it was uncanny to me how my body had etched the grief of that day into my body so that it would reappear on exactly that day. Over time it became less and less, or was it because I was deliberately ignoring the date so that I would not be reminded? I don’t know, but I do know that trauma will be etched in our bodies and can be triggered by dates, smells, sounds, and more…

I did not personally lose anyone in the towers, but I love humankind, and it was hatred that brought us to that awful moment in time, and it will not be hatred that will get us out of this grief, but hatred that will keep us seeped in grief and trapped in a cycle of harm. The person we harm the most when we hate is ourselves. We disconnect ourselves from ourselves when we hate. When we hate, we remove a part of ourselves that knows love, sees love, does love, and is love. And when we kill that part of ourselves, we kill the part of ourselves that loves us, our very selves. I love others because I love myself, and I want to do the same for others. Never let the hatred another bears infect your soul. That is their poison, that they have to cut out. But you can lead the way forward by not hating and not dividing yourself from others, even from the ones that have hurt you. See them differently so they might see themselves differently. Imagine a world where we have learned from this experience and where we have healed through understanding and compassion. Let us not try to soothe our pain in destructive ways; it only etches the pain even deeper and makes cruelty a standard by which to live by. That is not how God has created us. We were created to love one another and to care for one another; that is the standard by which to live by.

About the author: Raquel Irizarry has an MSSW from Columbia School of Social Work and a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary. She is a lay minister with the United Church of Christ, is also a Coordinating Committee Member of the NYC/NYS Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival and one of the Co-Founders of Brooklyn Interfaith.