This has been a different 9/11 for me than in years past. Until a few weeks ago, like most people, it had a dark cloud hanging in the proverbial sky, given the horrors we witnessed nine years ago. During a recent trip to New York, though, one of the meetings I attended was in a building near Ground Zero. Afterward, a fellow attendee and I visited an office on the side that overlooked the construction site…and my entire perspective shifted.
Three months after the towers came down, I visited the site, feeling my heart break in half. One of my best friends was supposed to be at a meeting in the Towers the morning of the attack, but a scant 18 hours earlier, the meeting was called off and he stayed home. Putting that together with the gaping hole before me was a real gut punch.
Four months later, my mom and I visited the site—a spot we’d been to together just a couple of years earlier. Again, a gut punch.
Since then, I’ve been at Ground Zero a couple of times for various reasons. The day before last month’s meeting, I was in Battery Park, surprised to see the Sphere from World Trade Center Plaza temporarily on display with an eternal flame before it, heavily damaged but still in tact. Remember that trip that Mom and I took to WTC? We stood next to the Sphere, marveling at what it stood for.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago. Here I was, standing in a window that overlooked Ground Zero, seeing it from the opposite side I’d been on one day earlier, and about sixty stories higher. From there, in this lofty nest, the world looked different. There was a buzz of new construction, including the two reflecting pools in the footprints of Tower 1 and Tower 2. Freedom Tower, a skyscraping marvel on the northwest corner of the site, is nearly complete, with vast windows you can peer through one side to the other, no offices moved in yet.
Across the block from Freedom Tower, on the south side of the site, was one of the original damaged buildings, still being disassembled a beam at a time, so as to avoid using any kind of explosive to raise it. Given its proximity to Ground Zero and the emotional impact that would have on folks in lower Manhattan, a peaceful exit had been planned, as opposed to a blast that would rock everyone’s foundations (literally and figuratively).
What struck me at that moment was the elegance of human determination and our unfathomable resilience as Americans. Yes, our collective hearts were broken that brilliant sunshine-filled morning nine years ago, but we weren’t down. We weren’t done. We weren’t broken.
We were alive and we weren’t going to stop being. Just. That.
Today, 9/11 didn’t feel as much like a protracted funeral as it did the rising of a Phoenix from the ashes. Had that moment high above the construction site not occurred, well…. It would have been the ninth heartbreaking day in a row. Instead, I witnessed a virtual badge of courage worn by countless people whose lives ended too early, but not without honor. My hope is that soon, we’ll all be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel I was so fortunate to peer into from sixty stories up.
Here’s to moving forward in a way that honors all who went before us, doing them justice by continuing to live our lives to the fullest, with determination, faith, and pride in the resilience our nation is built on.
We owe it to them.
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