09/11/2026
I remember exactly where I was on September 11, 2001.
I was in third grade, growing up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan—hundreds of miles away from New York City. The television was on in our classroom, and I remember watching the second plane hit the World Trade Center.
I was just a child. I didn’t understand terrorism. I didn’t understand the magnitude of what I was watching. But I understood the way the room changed.
In what felt like a moment, everything stopped.
We started being sent home. The normal school day disappeared. Televisions were on everywhere, all showing the same horrifying images. The adults around us were scared, even if they tried not to show it. There was this overwhelming feeling that something terrible had happened—and that the world we woke up in that morning was somehow different from the one we were going to bed in that night.
And it was.
Twenty-five years later, I can still picture that classroom. I can still remember watching that television. I can still remember the confusion of being a little girl in Michigan, watching something unfold hundreds of miles away and somehow knowing that it would matter for the rest of my life.
For my generation, there was a world before September 11, 2001—and a world after it.
Today, we remember the people who went to work that morning and never came home. The passengers who boarded airplanes expecting an ordinary flight. The firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and ordinary people who ran toward danger to help complete strangers. We remember the families whose lives were forever divided into *before* and *after* that morning.
Today, please pause for a moment of silence for the 2,977 lives lost during the attacks.
May we never forget.
