My mom is a 9/11 survivor, a title that, like survivors of most any traumatic occurrence, has no resplendent quality. It’s a weighty badge, earned from a day marred by fear, death and an irrevocable connection to something huge and horrible.
And yet, it’s a title that I felt I’d inherited in part through her experience. For as long as I can remember, the events of that day have been present with me, soldered deeply into my psyche, though I wasn’t there to witness them firsthand. It was a confusing amalgam of emotions, largely compounded by my mom’s general reticence to discuss the topic outside of a personal account she self-published several years ago to process her yearslong PTSD. I struggled to know if I had the right to grieve something that happened to her, and not to me.
Not exactly a secret, my complicated thoughts and feelings about my deeply personal connection to New York’s darkest day had always registered internally as something furtive. When the opportunity to publish my story in The New York Times arose, I still struggled with how to feel. On the one hand, I was overwhelmingly excited to have a byline in one of my favorite publications, a long-held dream of mine. Still, I wondered if sharing my conflicted emotions about how I should — and whether I could grieve 9/11 — would register as insincere, or worse, offend those whose friends and family didn’t come home that day.
These sentiments were further muddled by what I feel has been a prevailing cultural attitude toward 9/11 and other devastating events as the years go by. It’s true that while time can’t heal wounds entirely, it can assuage the pain they inflict. It can also numb us to the reality of how horrific something was.
I recall a recent conversation among friends in which someone cracked a “9/11 joke.” A few brief, halfhearted laughs gave way to stale air, where the jest hung heavily as the group took mental stock of my presence. I wasn’t offended, per se. But the sort of memeification of tragedy, in which it's haphazardly cast into a nebulous scion of the “dark humor” genre, feels an altogether ethical sticky terrain.
On another occasion, the parents of a close friend, who are from the Midwest, candidly admitted to me that while they had been shaken by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, they couldn’t begin to empathize with how it affected those from the greater New York area. In short, it’s not that it wasn’t a big deal to them, it just didn’t land as acutely as it did for those of us who lived in and around Manhattan in the late summer of 2001.
On the day my essay was published in The Times, around 7 a.m. several days before the 22nd anniversary of 9/11, the first thing I did was read the comments. There are 364 posted, and the comment section is now locked. The majority of them were vignettes, in which NYT readers from near and far recalled their own 9/11 story: where they were, what they were doing, an anecdote about their family member or friend who survived, just as my mom did. Some offered condolences to me, my mom, and my family. Others openly affirmed my right to grieve.
In the days that followed, other readers wrote me kind emails expressing their appreciation for the piece. Some were the children of 9/11 survivors like me, who claimed my story had validated their own in part, projecting a version of the deep-seated tension in their own lives. Some were sufferers of different forms of peripheral grief — the sibling of a terminally ill person, the child of a Holocaust survivor.
I can’t say I had an ostensible goal when I set out to write my 9/11 essay, other than holding the hearts and pain of all those impacted in high regard and doing justice to those whose lives were claimed that day. As I look back on the process of penning those jumbled thoughts into a coherent package, I can say it was undeniably cathartic for me. Ironically, though, this therapeutic sensation — rooted in an intimate family story — came largely from the story’s broader solidarity. So much of my story is about me and my mom — how I’m forever grateful that she came home to our family that day when so many other mothers didn’t, how speaking with her at length about the generational trauma of 9/11 helped us to come to terms with our grief individually and together. But it’s also a narrative of collective grief, an entity so expansive that trying to capture its meaning in one story and one day alone would be entirely futile.
Last summer, my mom, my dad and I attended the 9/11 Memorial & Museum together for the first time. Afterward, on the ferry ride home to New Jersey, I asked my mom if going to the museum had helped her to confront her grief.
“For a long time, I didn’t want to share my 9/11 experience because I was humbled by the experiences of others," she replied. "But after I wrote my memoir, so many people told me that they had seen themselves in a story that was distinctively mine. And that’s how I felt today — looking at images of women being carried by men in suits, seeing the fear on people’s faces, reliving it all. That was me. That was all of us."
After writing my essay and reading people’s reactions to it, I felt the same way. That shared sentiment reflected profoundly in the joint trauma my mother and I have around 9/11, made me only feel more strongly connected to others who also felt they didn’t have the license to mourn. It’s my sincere hope that when people encounter my story, it helps them gain a sense of clarity about their own grief, whatever it is.
I hope it helps them to never forget.
