They were there.
And then, they weren’t.
In the blink of an eye, thousands of lives gone. People who’d woken up that morning, probably like so many other Tuesdays, and gotten ready and been on their way, unaware of how the world was about to change.
In the cool, grey light of an unseasonably grey California morning, I was woken by a call from my mother in New Jersey. Still groggy, I struggled to wrap my mind around what she was telling me. It didn’t make sense.
The dorm I was living in was an apartment complex. I threw on some clothes and stumbled out into the hall, searching for others waking up to this news. I think Tim Roney was the first person I saw and talked with. A few of us headed upstairs, to our resident director’s apartment, where people were already huddled around the TV. We sat transfixed and mostly quiet, watching in horror as tragedy was replayed over and over. Gray clouds and an uneasy stillness hung over the campus all day, as we shuffled around not knowing what to think, watching the news on a TV in the student center as the same soul-crushing images played over and over and over.
For years, the Twin Towers were simply one of many details of life growing up in New Jersey. Every day as I drove to work, if it was a clear day I relished those few seconds when I could steady my hands on the wheel, look east out the passenger side window and see the towers straight out in the distance. Stalwart. They were simply a fixture, a seemingly permanent part of the landscape.
They were there.
And then, they weren’t.
I remember how we all felt united in grief and horror. How we felt bonded by a collective need for justice.
Twenty years later, what has changed? Our nation is divided, bitter, and weary. And are we any more mindful of the preciousness of life; the sanctity of every moment of breath granted us?
I, like the rest of you, will never forget what happened twenty years ago. But I am weary of forgetting the other things. I am tired of not holding closely enough the small moments, the exchanged words — the good, not simply the bad.
I remember a bitterly cold January day in New York, walking the streets of lower Manhattan, where the light barely filtered down to the floor of those canyons of steel, glass, and concrete. It felt cold and harsh. And then, as I stopped on a street corner, a shaft of light from out beyond the city walls penetrated, throwing its golden warmth across a small stretch of sidewalk. For seconds, each pedestrian who passed was bathed in illumination. Out of the shadows, back into the shadows.
Somehow, the light finds its way through the darkness.
Every day has the potential to be the day tragedy stands at your door. But every day is a chance to see the sunlight crash down through the darkness; to hold tightly the good things; and the opportunity to shine that light into another’s life. Today may be all we have. If everything falls apart tomorrow, what will you recall about today?
That is something worth never forgetting.
They were there.
And then, they weren’t.
We are still here. We still have today. What will we do with it?