I rarely write publicly about September 11.
I have my memories of that day and the months that followed, but for the most part I have kept them private. Maybe that is because 9/11 became so large in the national consciousness that individual memories can feel small beside it. Maybe it is because some experiences are easier to carry quietly than to explain. Twenty-five years later, though, the passage of time itself feels profound.
I have an adult child now.
She has never known the world I knew before September 11. She has never known airports before security became what it is now, or a New York City where heavily armed police, concrete barriers, checkpoints, and visible counterterrorism measures were not part of the ordinary landscape. More than that, I do not know how to explain to her what those months afterward felt like, when grief and fear were everywhere, but so was a kind of collective turning toward one another that I have never experienced in quite the same way since.
I was fifteen years old and in high school on September 11, 2001.
I remember being huddled into a room with other students, watching the towers burn on television while the adults around us tried to understand what we were seeing. Some of the staff had husbands, wives, children, family members, or friends who worked in or traveled through the city. One staff member had a son on a PATH train headed toward the World Trade Center, and his train turned around in time. I remember the fear in the adults around us almost as clearly as I remember the images on the television. At fifteen, adults were still supposed to know what was happening. They were supposed to have answers. That morning, they were watching the same television we were, trying to reach people they loved and waiting for information no one had yet.
My sister, only a few years older than me, was an EMT at the time. She was pulled from a college class that day to help in Jersey City.
New York itself was not some distant city I knew from television. I grew up in West Orange and could see Manhattan clearly from home. The towers shone outside my bedroom window. They were not landmarks I only noticed when I went into the city. They were part of the landscape I grew up looking at, familiar enough to be taken for granted.
I had also grown up going into the city. I knew the PATH and knew the World Trade Center as a place you traveled through on your way somewhere else. For my birthday in March 2001, I took the PATH into the World Trade Center and decided to walk from downtown to midtown. I wandered through neighborhood after neighborhood, getting lost and eventually finding my way again. At fifteen, that felt like an adventure.
That was often how we went into the city then. There was not always an itinerary or a destination. My friends and I would take the PATH, get off somewhere, walk, wander, and figure out what we were doing once we were there. The city itself was the activity.
Six months later, one of my friends came to visit. On Friday, September 7, we saw the Backstreet Boys at Continental Airlines Arena in the Meadowlands. At fifteen, this was an appropriately significant life event. She had originally planned to stay until September 11, but our parents decided she needed to go home on September 10 because we were already missing the first day of school. Apparently there was a limit to how much school we could miss for a concert and a visit. It was an entirely ordinary parental decision, and I think about it now in a way none of us possibly could have then.
While she was here, she told me she wanted to see the towers. My response was essentially, “That’s all there is down there.” To me, they were familiar. I had seen them over and over again. I could see them from home. I had taken the PATH through the World Trade Center. Downtown seemed less interesting than the parts of Manhattan that felt more exciting to a fifteen-year-old, so I convinced her we should do something else. We could see the towers next time.
There was supposed to be a next time.
That is one of the things I understand differently twenty-five years later. So much of life rests on the assumption that there will be another opportunity, another visit, another conversation, another birthday, another morning, another chance to go somewhere you skipped the first time because you assumed it was not going anywhere. None of us knew that the mundane decisions we made in those final days before September 11 would become memories we would still be carrying a quarter century later.
The next time my friend and I went downtown, the towers were Ground Zero.
When people talk about September 11 now, it is easy for the day itself to become the entire story. For those of us who lived close to it, there was also everything that came afterward. I remember needing to see the site for myself. Television was not enough. Photographs were not enough. Looking across the river at a skyline I no longer recognized was not enough. Once I could get close enough, I went downtown and made it near Trinity Church. Part of me needed physical evidence that what I had watched happen was real. The site still had a smell I have never forgotten, the smell of burning, destruction, and what I understood even then as the presence of death. Seeing it did not make it make sense. It only made it real.
I kept going into the city after that, much the same way I had before. My friends and I still did not necessarily go with an intention. We went because we could go. We took the PATH, wandered around, and let the day become whatever it became.
Except sometimes there was an intention now.
Sometimes I would go to Journal Square or into the city because I knew there would be memorial candles there. Sometimes my friend and I would make an entire trip out of walking around and relighting the ones that had gone out. We were teenagers with nowhere particularly important to be, moving through places covered in flowers, photographs, handwritten messages, and candles, carrying a lighter and putting flames back where they had disappeared.
At the time, I did not think of it as a ritual. I did not have language for collective grief or communal mourning, and I certainly was not analyzing why it mattered to me. It simply became something we did. Before September 11, we might have taken the PATH just to wander around Manhattan. Afterward, sometimes our reason for going was to tend to memorials left by people we did not know for people we had never met.
There is something about that which feels more significant to me now than it did then. Grief had entered ordinary life so completely that two teenagers could spend an afternoon relighting candles and not consider it unusual. It was simply part of what the city had become and part of what we did within it.
The world around us was changing at the same time. I am old enough to remember going to an airport terminal simply to watch the planes. I remember bringing liquids onto airplanes without thinking about ounces or clear plastic bags. I remember not taking off my shoes. I remember security existing without occupying the foreground of daily life in the way it eventually would.
There are adults now who have never known another version of the world. Those of us who remember watched extraordinary measures gradually become ordinary ones. We learned the new rules, stood in the new lines, adjusted to the new landscape, and eventually stopped noticing some of the things that would have seemed remarkable before. September 11 changed what frightened us, but it also changed what we accepted as normal.
I remember something else about that period that is even harder to explain to someone who did not live through it. I remember the way people came together. People donated blood, food, money, time, and whatever else they had. Communities gathered. Strangers spoke to each other. First responders were thanked by people who had never met them. There was a sense, at least in the world I could see at fifteen, that something had happened to all of us and that we were going to carry one another through it.
There was something beautiful in that response to something so horrific, and I have never experienced anything quite like it since.
At forty, I understand things I could not have understood at fifteen. That sense of unity was not experienced by everyone. Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and South Asian communities experienced suspicion, harassment, violence, and blame. Patriotism, grief, fear, and anger became intertwined in ways I was too young to fully recognize. My memory of people coming together does not erase that. It complicates it.
There were people looking for someone to blame, and there were also people looking for someone to help. What remains vivid to me is how often I saw the latter. Maybe being fifteen allowed me to experience some of it with an idealism I would not have now. Maybe memory softens certain edges. Still, I miss something about it. I do not miss the fear, the tragedy, or the uglier things that followed. I miss the instinct to turn toward one another.
I think about that differently now that I have an adult child. She grew up in the world that came after. The security measures, the wars, the language of terrorism, and the visible presence of armed security were already part of the background by the time she was old enough to notice them. What she cannot really know is the contrast. She cannot know what it felt like to watch the country fracture from horror and, for a brief period, also seem to pull together around the idea that other people’s suffering mattered.
September 11 also became woven into the lives of people my age in ways I did not fully understand while it was happening. I had already talked about becoming an EMT before September 11. If I am being truthful, some of the original appeal was social. My sister was young, the squad had a community around it, and it seemed like something I might want to be part of. I was interested, but I was not especially committed. The following summer, I became an EMT at the same squad. By then, being able to help when something went wrong meant something different to me.
Through the squad, I became familiar with first responders who had experienced September 11 from different sides of the event. Some had participated in the response. Others had been involved elsewhere in the region. Some had spent that day waiting, transporting, coordinating, or trying to account for people they knew. In those circles, the event was not simply national history. It was personal.
I also watched people around me move toward careers in law enforcement, emergency management, the military, and other forms of public service. Many of the people I graduated high school with eventually served. Not every decision can or should be traced neatly back to September 11. Lives are more complicated than that. Still, it was part of the atmosphere in which we came of age.
I thought seriously enough about military service that, at eighteen, I spoke with a Navy recruiter. Between my health history and the realities of military service, it simply was not in the cards for me. I went to college instead, explored liberal arts, and tried to figure out what I wanted my life to look like in the way eighteen-year-olds do. Then I met my boyfriend. When he decided to join the military, we married quickly, and for the next six years military life became my life too. It was not a straight line from September 11 to the choices I made afterward, and I would not pretend that it was. Looking backward, though, I can see how thoroughly that event was woven into the generation in which I became an adult.
There was another side of September 11 I came to understand through someone I loved. My best friend in high school had lost his father in the towers before I ever met him. His birthday was September 10. That detail has always stayed with me because, for his family, the line between before and after was not historical. A birthday, something that should have belonged entirely to celebration, sat directly beside the anniversary of the day his father died.
I had experienced September 11 as someone who watched it happen nearby. Through him, I saw more clearly what it meant when a national tragedy became part of the private architecture of a family. Grief does not remain confined to the day everyone else remembers. It continues through birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, weddings, ordinary conversations, and all the places where someone is still supposed to be.
Twenty-five years later, I still cannot listen to some of the final phone calls without crying. I can read stories I already know and still feel tears come. I can hear the details of someone’s last ordinary minutes and, despite knowing exactly how the story ends, find some part of myself wishing it would turn out differently this time. Time gives us context. It gives us language. It allows us to understand things we could not understand at fifteen. It does not necessarily make them less devastating.
Maybe that is why the candles stay with me so much. We tend to think remembrance has to be grand to matter: ceremonies, memorials, moments of silence, names read aloud. Those things matter tremendously, but remembrance also happens in much smaller ways. Sometimes it is two teenagers taking the PATH with no real destination except to walk around and light candles that have gone dark.
For most of the past twenty-five years, I have not had much to say publicly about any of this. Maybe I did not need to. The people around me remembered too. We knew the world before, we watched it change, and many of us built our adult lives in the aftermath without necessarily stopping to examine how much of that history we were carrying with us.
Twenty-five years later, that feels different.
I can look at my adult child and realize that something that remains so immediate in my own memory belongs entirely to history for her. She can see photographs of the towers, hear recordings of the final calls, read about the people who ran toward danger, and learn about everything that followed. What she cannot inherit from a history book is the feeling of seeing those towers outside a bedroom window and believing they would always be there, or what it was like to move through Journal Square and Manhattan in the months afterward when memorials seemed to be everywhere and tending to them could become the purpose of an afternoon.
She also cannot fully know that strange period when grief seemed to make people more aware of one another. I am not sure I can adequately explain it. I am not even sure those of us who lived it would all remember it in the same way. I only know that I saw people show up for strangers in a way that left an impression on me as deep as many of the frightening changes that followed.
Maybe that is why I am writing about it now. Not because my experience belongs at the center of a tragedy that took so much from so many people, but because twenty-five years is long enough to see personal memory beginning to become history. It feels important to say what the world looked like from where I stood before some of us are no longer here to describe it.
I remember the towers outside my bedroom window. I remember telling a friend there was not much to see downtown because I assumed we could always go another time. I remember needing to stand near Trinity Church before I could fully believe they were gone. I remember riding the PATH without any particular destination and, later, riding it specifically because there were candles that needed to be relit. I remember the people who chose service, the people whose families never stopped carrying the loss, and the extraordinary ways people tried to care for one another in the weeks and months that followed.
There was supposed to be a next time. There was also, for a little while afterward, a sense that whatever came next, we were going to face it together.
Twenty-five years later, I think I am mourning both.
Amanda Brindle, LCSW 