When a good friend asked me to speak at the 9/11 ceremony in the Philadelphia suburbs, I told him I was a little surprised he would think of me.
I was not a victim of the terror attacks in any immediate way. I didn’t lose any close friends or family. I am not, nor am I related to a first responder. I wasn’t even in Manhattan, or at the Pentagon, or near that bucolic piece of land in western Pennsylvania 25 years ago.
But then I realized something, something quite simple: We are all victims of 9/11, and we are all in our own separate and excruciatingly personal way, survivors.
Every single person that was alive when the planes rained fire and fury down upon this country has felt its impact. I was three months away from turning 40, so I’d already lived more than half of my life when the first tower fell.
My mother, a couple of years younger than I am now, had been born into World War II, and came of age during the Cold War boom. I had young relatives who were in school, much like the children being read to by President George W. Bush when the planes shattered our sense of self, our sense of security, and forever broke history into before and after.
Every single one of us who can remember that day is marked by it, even if we don’t think that we were. I can go for long stretches of time without remembering the sense of horror that overwhelmed me that heartbreakingly beautiful Tuesday morning.
I had suffered tragedies before then, and I’ve suffered tragedies since, as we all have, and the rhythm of the days switches back into their normal courses, because the pull of daily living is powerful.
Life goes on.
And yet, without warning, I will be catapulted back into the memory maelstrom, and the faces and the names and the voices come flooding back. It happened the other day, a morning so exquisite with pre-autumnal promise.
I was walking to work and looked up at the sky, and the random thought hit: It was exactly like this on 9/11.
Other times I will be looking through old emails on my AOL account — yes, I have an AOL account —and there will be a message from someone who wrote to thank me about some long-ago column I’d written honoring Father Mychal Judge, or praising our warriors, or asking for attention for the first responders, or defending the Patriot Act, or other things that form a part of that history.
And I know that you, like me, have experienced the same thing, as if parts of our lives back then were packed away into the time capsules we used to fill as children, and then excavate decades later to see what we were like “back then.”
We were very different, back then. Very different.
First, we understood the concept of war, but from a distance. Our sons had been killed in combat in Japan, in Italy, in Korea and in Vietnam, and we knew that deep sorrow.
But we ourselves had never been attacked this way, unless you count Pearl Harbor and the first World Trade Center bombing. The theater of war was always “over there,” as George M. Cohan wrote.
But now, it had come looking for us in our homes. And that changed our DNA.
The thing I really remember is how we treated one another in the days after 9/11. Most of us remember a sense of community that we hadn’t experienced before, and, more importantly, since.
It did not last very long, and even at the very beginning, it wasn’t universal. As an immigration lawyer, I remember some of my clients feeling very uncomfortable, even those who were so Americanized that you only knew from their names that they were Muslim. There was some bigotry and suspicion, which is completely normal.
But overall, we clung to one another like survivors cling to the common raft of our experience, our grief and our resolve. We pulled out our flags, not in some jingoistic way but as a security blanket, a reminder of who we were.
We were more tolerant of political differences, even for a short while, and more humble.
Our allies were our allies, and all across the world there were outpourings of grief and solidarity, even from places we would have least expected it, including the streets of Iran. The terrorists had tried to destroy us, and instead they strengthened us, at least for a while.
Of course, the aftermath was complicated, littered with losses and battles, both on foreign fields and in the halls of Congress. The connections made in those early days frayed and dissolved.
Children born after 9/11 have neither the sense of grief nor the sense of community that we share.
But it is our job to help them understand what this means, how it changed us, who we now are, and why it is so important that we never forget. We owe it to them, to ourselves, and most importantly, to those who are no longer here.
Copyright 2026 Christine Flowers
