I’ll Never Forget How Quiet the World Was

I was just starting my workday at Zurich Insurance in Schaumburg on the morning of September 11, 2001.

The guy at the desk across from me always listened to the radio in the morning. Suddenly, he exclaimed that there had been a plane crash.

“What do you mean, a plane crash?”

He said a plane had hit a building in New York City.

In my mind, I pictured a small airplane and a small building. Still tragic, of course. But nothing remotely close to the reality that was beginning to unfold.

A crowd started forming around his desk as we listened to the radio. Slowly, we understood: it was a passenger jet. It was the World Trade Center.

People started crying.

Someone found a small portable television, and we gathered in a conference room. Together, we watched the second plane hit.

We watched people jumping from windows. We watched the towers fall. We watched unimaginable horror unfold in front of us, and alongside it, unimaginable heroism.

We cried. We hugged and held hands. We shared our shock and tried to comprehend what we were seeing.

Not long afterward, we were told to go home. The building was closing. No one really knew why. As we shuffled out, people speculated quietly. The Zurich Towers were the tallest buildings in Schaumburg. Was that why?

On a morning when suddenly nowhere seemed completely safe, even that possibility felt heavy.

My mom worked at Zurich then, too. I went home with her because I didn't want to be alone. Her house was under a busy flight path into O'Hare. The sound of airplanes overhead was simply part of being there, so constant that most of the time you barely noticed it. But that day, there were no planes.

You noticed their absence.

We went to a neighbor's house because none of us wanted to be alone. I remember sitting on her porch together in silence. There simply weren't words.

And without the planes passing overhead, the silence somehow felt even louder. No engines in the sky. No normal hum of the world going about its business. Just this strange, enormous stillness.

I'll never forget how quiet the world was.

But I’ll never forget what came afterward, either. In the midst of so much fear and grief, the thing that gave me hope, and soothed some of my fear, was the incredible sense of unity that followed.

Flags appeared everywhere. Strangers looked out for one another. People gathered, donated, volunteered, grieved and helped.

For a little while, our differences seemed smaller.

We reached for each other. We checked on our neighbors. We stood together. There was this powerful feeling that whatever else might make us different, we belonged to one another.

That sense of unity and patriotism gave me comfort at a time when the world suddenly felt very frightening.

Twenty-five years later, I find myself thinking about both things: the terrible quiet of that day and the extraordinary connection that followed it. I wish we could recapture some of that connection without needing a tragedy to remind us how much we need one another.

September 11 belongs to all of us in different ways. Those who lost someone carry a story far heavier than mine. First responders, service members and their families carry stories of sacrifice and consequences that continued long after that day.

And millions of the rest of us carry smaller memories: of a desk, a radio, a tiny television, a classroom, a phone call, a neighbor's porch. Ordinary things and places that became permanently attached to an extraordinary moment.

Those stories matter, too.

Because remembering isn't only about remembering what happened. It's also about remembering how we responded to one another. And remembering that, despite all our differences, we still need one another.