Nineteen years ago today, on a morning when the sky was so blue that it hurt your heart just a little to look away from it, murderous cowards killed almost three thousand people and irrevocably altered the course of the lives not merely of those they killed but the loved ones and the family members they left behind. They also irrevocably altered the lives of those who, in the days, weeks, and months that followed, responded to the killing field known as Ground Zero desperately searching for evidence of those murdered there and who were paid for their service by contracting forms of cancer and other serious (often deadly) respiratory illnesses. Nineteen years later, the death toll of September 11, 2001 remains incalculable because that day's events continue to kill and continue to irrevocably alter lives, both of those killed and of those left behind to mourn and to bury them.
"Never Forget" is not a political tag line. It is not a bumper sticker. It is not a hashtag. It is an acknowledgment of a debt, a debt that belongs to each of us. It is a debt we should not only acknowledge but that we should gladly do our part to pay, whether one of the innocents murdered either on or by September 11, 2001, was our loved one. It is a debt we honor in the same way that we hope someone honors it for us upon our death.
More than a decade prior to the day's events, Don Henley sang of the fraught-with-danger nature of a
New York Minute and offered some words of wisdom, "
You find somebody to love in this life, you better hang on tooth and nail. The wolf is always at the door."
At 8:46 a.m., hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later, at 9:03 a.m., hijacked United Airlines Flight 175 was deliberately flown into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 was flown deliberately into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. At 9:59 a.m., fifty-six minutes after it was struck, the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. The heroic efforts of the passengers that prevented hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 from reaching its target (believed to be Washington, D.C.) led to the plane's high-speed, violent crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m. Twenty-five minutes later, less than two hours after Flight 11 had struck it, the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. It was 10:28 a.m.
In slightly less than two hours, close to 3,000 people had been killed, including 343 members of the FDNY, 37 members of the PA NY/NJ PD, and 23 members of the NYPD, all of whom died at the World Trade Center while rescuing the thousands of civilians trapped in the Twin Towers...many of whom died along side the men and women who had rushed headlong into hell to save them.
Too often we numb ourselves to the harsh reality of a situation by examining the big picture - by referring to some horror as a "mass casualty" event in which we speak of total loss of life rather than the individual lives lost. In doing so - and without meaning to do it - we do a disservice to those who died and to the loved ones they left behind. Each of those killed on September 11, 2001 was not a statistic or part of an aggregate. He or she was everything to loved ones lost and to family members left behind. Nothing less. Not then. Not now. Not ever.
It is, it has been, and it shall always be the duty of those of us who were alive and who bore witness to the events of that day, and to the interwoven events that followed from it, to ensure that those killed shall not simply be mourned but shall be honored, and shall be remembered. It is a duty I accept and one I intend to fulfill for all of the days of my life.
-AK
