Twenty-Five Years: Remembering 9/11

Twenty-five years ago this morning, I walked into my office at Fidelity without checking the news or the markets first.

I was two years into the job. I had just been moved up to what was, in everything but title, a junior advisor. I was young enough to think the day started when I got to my desk.

It was the last time I ever walked in that way.

Nancy and Louise were standing in the lobby, holding each other and crying, staring at the television. I stood next to them and watched the replays. Nobody said much. There was not much to say.

All day, people kept calling it our Pearl Harbor. They kept saying things would never be the same. They were right about the second part. My children were two and four. They would never know a world where you could walk to the gate to meet someone off a plane. Small things like that are how a generation learns what it lost.

Two things from that day have stayed with me, and I expect they always will.

The first is the sadness. It was total, and it was shared. Everyone in that office, everyone on the phone, everyone we passed on the way home carried the same weight.

The second is what happened in the same hour. People held each other. Not their friends. Whoever was closest. The arguments we had been having the day before, about politics, about football, about all the things we let divide us, simply stopped. For a while, none of it mattered, and everyone knew it.

Twenty-five years later, I get to choose what to remember. I choose the people who ran toward the towers. I choose the passengers who understood what was happening and acted anyway. And I choose that brief stretch of days when the country was not divided into sides, because it did not occur to anyone to be.

We have not held on to that. But we had it once, and I saw it. I think it is worth remembering that we are capable of it.

To the families who carry this day differently than the rest of us: you are remembered here.

Sean