Never Forget, Always Remember

Talk of the Town - September 2026

A woman’s remembrance of the day none of us will ever forget, and a chance for her to revisit her feelings of that day.

- Story by Rhonda Rhodes

September 11, 2001, was a Tuesday and my husband’s birthday. I was home on maternity leave with my youngest child. My sister called and said, “A plane just hit the World Trade Center. Turn on the TV.” I watched in shock as the news media tried to make sense of what was happening – then terror as the second plane hit.
 

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I sat holding my infant, frozen in rising fear and overwhelming sadness as the reporters scrambled to report all the missing flights that were not yet accounted for. At one point there were seven flights unaccounted for. Then the Pentagon. And then there was one; the fatal flight headed for Washington that ended in a Pennsylvania meadow; we would not learn about the heroes on that plane until later.
 

 
I watched people jumping out of buildings live on television, and Peter Jennings cried. I cried when they hung the flag on the outside of Pentagon. Our beautiful country was being attacked on its own soil using its own people. That night, I laid in bed with my babies all tucked in and felt something completely new: fear of an attack on American soil. That day changed every American who watched it unfold. Our innocence and security were gone, replaced by a fierce resolve to persevere. We cried. We held our babies tighter. We went to church. We held hands with strangers. We loved each other and we loved our country. We stood together, unified, for one beautiful, shining moment.
 

 
Last February, I finally made it to the 9/11 Memorial in New York. We planned the visit for the morning, and the website informed us that ninety minutes would be plenty of time for our visit. Four hours in, I was so saturated that I couldn’t bear another memory and I had not been through half of it. I will go back and finish it one day because it deserves to be remembered. As a nation, we can never forget what cowards do when our freedoms threaten them. The 9/11 Memorial was beautiful, terrible, sad, and hopeful all at once.
 

 
After leaving, we walked past Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, taking a moment to give thanks for the first responders who ran into those buildings, the priest and other chaplains that lost their lives ministering to the injured and the afraid. Some lost their lives that day and some slowly and painfully years later. They all deserve to be remembered. “No Day Shall Erase You from the Memory of Time.”
 

 
It’s been 25 years, a generation. There are children in school today learning about 9/11 like we learned about World War II, this foreign, removed, abstract event that happened. The people who died on 9/11 doing what they did every day deserve to be remembered, and the cowardice of the terrorists that took their lives should never be forgotten. We must talk to our children and our grandchildren and tell them the story of what it felt like that day. We also must teach them what it was like on September 12, about the unity of our country and the solidarity with our neighbor. We should never forget either day, and we should remember that in spite of our differences, we are all one nation.
 

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