I’ve already shared a little of our personal story, my husband’s and mine, about being some of the “plane people” “come from away” 25 years ago today, on 9/11/2001. You can read that sliver of our story here: https://dgvelaw.com/9-11-20-years-ago-tomorrow/ Every year I’m more grateful for handwriting my raw journal starting the next day, before setting it down about 6 weeks later. My own memories of the details have gone the way of my eyesight in the quarter of a century since then, still very present, but not as sharp as they once were without a little assistance. When I typed up my journal a year later while approaching the one year anniversary, it was 45 single-spaced pages long.
Gen Alpha would prefer the short-form video version or pictures, but I don’t have any more pictures to share from that day, nor any videos. 9/11/2001 was not only before some of my youngest daughter’s teachers were born, as she informed me this morning before she left for school, but also before most of us were walking around with cameras in our pockets, which she can barely imagine. So the last picture my husband took of me was that overtired one outside our hostel in Rome around 5:30am that morning.
That was before we twenty-somethings, then fresh out of law school and happily weary from a month of backpacking through Spain, France, and Italy in celebration of graduating law school and finishing the bar exam, began our flights home.
I don’t recall checking in for our flight from Rome to London, not only because I was never a morning person, but also because it was just non-eventful, as most travel by air was back then. Growing up just north of Boston, Massachusetts, I was fortunate to have flown from and back to Logan Airport countless times. Then attending college and living once again in Washington, D.C., I had flown in and out of Washington National Airport almost as many times. I loved flying and have no memories of ever being afraid to fly before that day. I think of that often, when my clients call anxiously wanting to update their estate plans before flying.
I vividly recall the intense examination of our boarding passes, baggage claim tickets, and passports at the gate in Heathrow Airport that morning, before our flight finally took off at 7:00AM Eastern time. I also remember how when we finally deplaned in St. John’s, Newfoundland about 24 hours later, we were permitted to pass through customs with only the clothes on our backs and our wallets. We had to leave our old-school camera in our backpacks on the plane.
I think the next pictures we took were a couple weeks later, when we visited the heartbreaking, makeshift memorial outside the Pentagon, near our apartment. By then I had cried enough tears to fill Boston Harbor, the Hudson River, and the Potomac River. By then we had seen and heard the news, initially from the Jumbotron in the St. John’s Maple Leafs’ hockey rink and then from the TVs inside the Convention Center, that more than two hundred people from and with ties to my home state were murdered that day. We saw that my husband’s old office in the World Trade Center was destroyed, and we learned by then that some of our friends had survived close calls while some friends’ closest friends did not.
Twenty-five years later, the oldest of our four daughters is nearly as old as I was that Tuesday morning. The toddler my husband and I drove home in a shared rental car from NYC to Washington, D.C., with that little boy’s father and very pregnant mom, would be about 27 years old now. The other pregnant woman who was seated behind us on our plane with her husband also had a boy, who would be about 25 years old now. Those children, now young adults, have no more memory of 9/11 than our children I’m sure, but like ours, they also probably thought about it differently when they were learning that history lesson in school.
I learned in school that we should never forget, learn from our collective histories as painful as the realities of them are, and stay informed so we can avoid repeating tragedies. Seeing Osama bin Laden’s face across the entire front page of the newspaper another passenger was reading in the lobby of the St. John’s Convention Center on 9/12/2001, I knew in an instant, from knowing some history, that racism and xenophobia were about to rear their ugly heads in response to our pain, anger, and fear. We wanted answers, someone to blame, and someone to pay. I remember the goosebumps I felt viscerally when I listened to George W. Bush tell the first responders at Ground Zero through a bullhorn, “I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
As a parent I’ve learned that, hard as it can be to do in practice, listening and asking more questions and responding peacefully with compassion, while laying down and holding firmly to the law, effectuates more and better change than angrily responding with shame and punishment. Twenty-five years after our country’s traumatic experience on 9/11/2001, I’m afraid we’re still witnessing the backlash. As a country, we Americans haven’t done a great job at acknowledging and reconciling messy, complex, painful, intersecting truths. I’m afraid we started down the wrong path, and observing our trajectory through a wider, historical lens, I don’t like where it’s leading.
I’d like to see us go back to the days immediately after 9/11 when more of the world came together in peace and solidarity, showing one another grace and offering strangers like me and my husband, come from away, kindness, compassion, and generous help with no expectation of ever receiving anything in return. As the Dalai Lama says, we are each one of the billions of human beings sharing this little blue planet of ours together in the middle of the vast universe. None of us, at our core, is really much different from anyone else.
When my daughters were little, one of the board books I loved reading to them was “The Peace Book” by Todd Parr.
Just about everyone, everywhere, all around the world, wants the same basic things. We want to be safe, housed, and have safe water to drink, food to eat, and air to breathe. We want to love and be loved, and we want to be treated with dignity and recognition of our shared humanity. Respect for civil liberties and agreeing to respect the rule of law within a healthy democracy gets us closer to those ideals. Grievance and misdirected anger moves us farther and farther away from them, and from one another. We are stronger together than any of us is alone.
It really does take a village to raise a child, especially without a big family network of support. I’m grateful for the friends and neighbors we’ve been so fortunate to have over the past couple decades raising our children here in Hingham (you know who you are!) and I want the same for all children and their families, everywhere. I’m grateful for all the client families I’ve been able to serve through my law practice, helping them protect what matters most, and experience more peace of mind. I’m grateful for the Newfoundlanders’ example of grace under pressure and unreasonable hospitality, when they were given the choice between that and closing their doors and hearts out of fear. [Please see the superbly done Come From Away ]
Today was another beautiful, blue sky, bright, sunny day and while I definitely took some moments to enjoy it, I’ve still felt that familiar sorrow I guess I’ll always carry thinking of how quickly our basest and most vile impulses and actions can destroy so much so quickly. I cannot even imagine what so many people around our world have endured and continue to endure that way. Even in the face of so much pain and suffering, I still believe we can choose a better way, toward peace. I hope my children will know that world, and live in a way that turns ours toward it.
#jemesouviens #neverforget
With love,
Danielle