Twenty-five years is a long time.
In 2016, I traveled with a group of Boy Scouts to Gettysburg. On our way, we stopped in New York City to visit the September 11th Memorial and Museum. It had been fifteen years since the attacks, but for me, walking into that place was not simply a visit to a museum. It was a return to something I remembered.
I remembered that Tuesday morning. I remembered watching events unfold and slowly realizing that what we were witnessing was going to change us. I remembered the fear and uncertainty of those days and the strange feeling that the world we had known when we woke up that morning was somehow gone.
At the memorial, I found the name of Father Mychal Judge, the Franciscan friar and chaplain to the New York City Fire Department who was killed at the World Trade Center. Father Mychal’s ministry had already become important to me. His example of simply being present with firefighters, in the ordinary moments as well as the terrible ones, helped shape my understanding of chaplaincy. In a very real sense, he is one of the reasons I became a fire chaplain.
But one of the moments from that visit that has stayed with me happened afterward, during a conversation with the Scouts. Somewhere along the way, we realized that many of them had not even been born on September 11, 2001. Others had been too young to remember it.
For me, September 11th was memory.
For them, it was history.
The world that had suddenly become our new normal was simply normal to them. They had never known anything else. They had not experienced the before and after that those of us old enough to remember September 11th still carry within us.
I have thought about that conversation many times since, but especially as we approach the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th. A quarter century has now passed. There are adults building careers, raising families, serving in the military, becoming firefighters and police officers, teaching children, and entering ministry who were not alive when the towers fell.
Living memory is becoming inherited memory.
And that raises a question I don’t think we talk about often enough: What exactly are we remembering? Perhaps an even more difficult question is this: What are we still grieving?
There is an episode of the television series Rescue Me that has stayed with me for years. Lt. Ken Shea, one of the firefighters, begins writing poetry as a way of dealing with his grief after September 11th. He is invited to share his poetry with a bereavement group, but as he begins talking with the people gathered there, he discovers that none of them had been in New York that day and none had lost someone they knew.
His reaction is not particularly charitable, but underneath his anger is an important question:
Whose grief is this?
There are people for whom September 11th is not primarily a national tragedy. It is the day their husband died. Their wife. Their mother or father. Their son or daughter. Their friend. Their fellow firefighter, police officer, or coworker. There are people who heard a voice for the last time that morning. There are children who grew up with photographs where a parent should have been.
That grief belongs to them in a way it can never belong to me. We should never pretend otherwise.
But recognizing the sacredness of their grief does not require the rest of us to deny our own.
A family can grieve. A firehouse can grieve. A congregation can grieve. A community can grieve. A nation can grieve. Sometimes we grieve because someone we love has died. Sometimes we grieve because the world we knew has changed and cannot be recovered.
September 11th gave us both.
Perhaps, twenty-five years later, we are finally far enough away to admit that we are grieving all of it.
We grieve the nearly three thousand people who died that day and the families who have carried their absence ever since. We grieve the first responders and others whose bodies continued to bear the consequences of that day years and even decades later. We grieve those who went to war and did not come home, and those who returned carrying wounds seen and unseen.
We grieve the security we thought we had. We grieve the innocence we discovered we did not possess. We grieve the fear that entered our public life and the suspicion that followed it. We grieve Muslim neighbors who were made targets of hatred because of the actions of people they did not know. We grieve decisions made in fear and consequences we could not foresee. We grieve what happened to us, and we grieve some of what happened within us.
Maybe we have been afraid to say that.
Collective grief is complicated because there is no single empty chair toward which we can point and say, “There. That is what we lost.” There are thousands of empty chairs, certainly, but there are other losses too, harder to name and impossible to count.
And grief that remains unnamed does not simply disappear.
Sometimes it becomes anger. Sometimes fear. Sometimes suspicion. Sometimes an aching nostalgia for a world we imagine existed before everything changed. Naming grief does not solve it, but naming it can keep grief from naming us.
There is something else I remember about that Scout trip.
We were on our way to Gettysburg.
After standing at the footprints of the World Trade Center, we traveled to another piece of ground marked by American death and national grief. No one alive today remembers the Battle of Gettysburg. No one can tell us where they were when they first heard that the fighting had begun. Living memory disappeared generations ago.
And yet, when we stand on that ground, we know we are standing somewhere that matters.
Someone carried the story forward.
That is what memory asks of us.
“Never Forget” has been associated with September 11th almost from the beginning. Twenty-five years later, however, those words must mean something more than remembering where we were, because increasingly there are people among us who cannot remember.
Perhaps “Never Forget” means remembering the people whose names are carved into stone. Remembering those who ran toward danger when every instinct told them to run away. Remembering extraordinary acts of courage and ordinary acts of kindness. Remembering the fear and what fear did to us. Remembering the mistakes as well as the heroism. Remembering enough of the whole story that those who inherit it from us understand not only what happened, but why it matters.
And then we must do something with the memory.
I think again of Father Mychal Judge.
I never met him. I never heard him preach. I never watched him walk into a firehouse or sit beside a firefighter who was struggling. I know him because others carried his story forward.
And that story mattered.
His example became one of the reasons I eventually became a fire chaplain myself. There is also something else from his ministry that we have inherited. “Serving Those Who Serve” has become the motto of the Massachusetts Corps of Fire Chaplains, words we inherited from Father Mychal. Those four words say something simple but profound about the vocation of a fire chaplain. We are called to be present for the people who spend their lives being present for everyone else.
In that sense, Father Mychal’s ministry did not end on September 11th.
It continues when a chaplain walks into a firehouse with no agenda other than to sit and listen. It continues when we stand beside firefighters after a difficult call, when we accompany a family through tragedy, when we show up at a hospital, a kitchen table, or a graveside. It continues whenever we serve those who serve.
A life I never personally encountered helped shape the life I chose to live. Words handed down from one chaplain have become words that guide other chaplains a generation later.
Memory became vocation. Remembrance became service.
Perhaps that is what we should ask of our collective memory of September 11th.
The purpose of remembering cannot simply be to keep the memory of that terrible day alive. Memory should change us. Grief should deepen us. The stories of courage and sacrifice, compassion and fear, hatred and loss, service and love entrusted to us should teach us something about the people we want to become.
So, twenty-five years later, perhaps we need to ask something more of ourselves than, “Where were you?”
We need to remember, and we need to grieve. But we need to do more.
We need to become better.
To become kinder where fear would make us suspicious. Braver where fear would make us retreat. More willing to cross the boundaries that fear tells us to defend. More willing to recognize the humanity of our neighbor. More willing to show up for one another in the ordinary days so that, when the terrible day comes, presence is already part of who we are.
The Scouts who stood with me at the September 11th Memorial in 2016 did not remember that Tuesday morning.
They didn’t need to.
Our responsibility was to tell them the story faithfully enough that they could inherit more than our fear. We needed to give them the courage, compassion, sacrifice, mistakes, sorrow, service, and hope as well.
Twenty-five years after September 11th, that responsibility belongs to all of us who remember. We cannot choose what happened to us that morning, and we cannot undo everything that followed. But we can decide what we will carry forward and what we will hand to those who come after us.
Perhaps that is one of the sacred tasks of grief.
We remember those who are gone. We tell the truth about what was lost. We carry the stories entrusted to us. And then, somehow, we try to make something of the love that remains.
The question is no longer simply whether we will remember.
The question is what our remembering will make of us.
