As with most people of my generation, I remember exactly where I was on the morning of September 11, 2001.
I was living in Miami. I had just returned from coaching the University of Miami novice rowing team and gotten out of the shower when my roommate told me I “had to come check something out.”
I walked into the room and saw the Twin Towers burning on television.
Even now, twenty-five years later, I can remember how completely incongruous the image seemed. My brain couldn’t quite put together what my eyes were seeing. Those buildings were permanent. They were part of the landscape of America, part of the background of movies and television shows, part of that unmistakable silhouette of New York City. They always seemed to greet me in the distance as I drove home from college north on the New Jersey turnpike toward Connecticut.
Those buildings were on fire.
For my family, September 11 would become personal in a way we never could have imagined.
My cousin, Bill Biggart, was a photojournalist living in Manhattan. After the first plane struck the World Trade Center, Bill did what photographers do. He grabbed his cameras and headed toward the story.While thousands of people were trying to get away from Lower Manhattan, Bill made his way downtown, photographing what was happening around him.
He never came home.
There is something almost unbearably powerful to me about knowing that his photographs survived him. His final images preserved fragments of that morning, moments that otherwise would have disappeared with the people who experienced them. Bill's own archive recounts how his cameras were recovered from the rubble and how the images he captured in his final minutes survived. Those photographs are more than documentation. They are memory. And memory is complicated.
We say Never Forget every September 11. We put the words on signs. We post them on social media. We teach them to our children. But twenty-five years have now passed. There are adults alive today who were not born when September 11 happened. In fact, 1/3 of the current population of the United States wasn't even born before 9/11. There are millions of young people for whom 9/11 is not a memory at all. It is history.
History tells us what happened, but stories tell us what it felt like.
I can tell someone that terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. A history book can explain the timeline far better than I ever could. But it cannot tell someone what it felt like to walk out of a shower on an ordinary Tuesday morning with salt water still stubbornly stuck in my hair and see something on television that seemed physically impossible.
It cannot recreate the strange silence of that day. It cannot explain the phone calls people made. The people they worried about. The people they could not reach. The things parents tried to explain to their children. The confusion. The fear. The kindness. The anger.
The feeling that the world you had gone to sleep in the night before was somehow not the same world anymore.
Those are stories. And almost all of us who lived through September 11 have one. Where were you? Who were you with? Who did you call? What did you think when you first saw the towers? When did you realize this wasn't an accident? What do you remember about the days afterward? Those answers may seem permanent to us now.
Shortly after graduating from college, I moved to New York City.
Lower Manhattan still had an enormous, debris-filled hole where the World Trade Center had stood. The absence of the towers felt almost like a presence itself. You could look downtown and feel what was missing. I lived in New York for more than a decade, and by the time I moved away, One World Trade Center was nearing completion.
In some small way, my years in New York were bookended by those two images: a hole in the skyline when I arrived and a new tower rising from it when I left.
Destruction and rebuilding. Absence and memory. Loss and continuation.
Maybe that is why the words Never Forget feel different to me as I get older. Never Forget cannot simply mean that those of us who remember September 11 promise to keep remembering it. Because eventually, we won't be here. It has to mean that we tell the stories.
That is where something like Reflekta fits into this conversation, quietly and, I hope, respectfully. We did not build Reflekta for September 11. And I would never want to use a day of such enormous loss as an opportunity to sell something. But we did build Reflekta around a belief that feels particularly important today:
Human memories deserve to survive the people who carry them.
The sound of someone's voice matters. The way your father described that morning matters. The story your grandmother told about trying to reach someone in New York matters. The memory of the stranger who helped someone get home matters. Your story of sitting in a classroom, an office, a firehouse, a kitchen or a dorm room matters.
Technology can preserve dates, photographs, headlines and video. But people preserve meaning. Imagine, decades from now, a great-grandchild being able to ask:
"Where were you on September 11?"
And instead of receiving a paragraph from a history book, they could hear the answer from someone in their own family. Not a historian. Not an algorithm trying to summarize the day. Their grandfather. Their grandmother. Their mother. Their father.
Someone who was there.
That, to me, is what remembering really means. Today, I think about the nearly 3,000 people who went to work, boarded airplanes, responded to an emergency or simply began an ordinary Tuesday morning and never came home.
I think about their families. I think about Bill.
And I think about a morning twenty-five years ago when I walked out of the shower in Miami and my roommate told me there was something I needed to see.
I can still see those towers burning. I can still remember how impossible it looked.
Someday, the people who remember that morning firsthand will be gone. But our stories do not have to disappear with us.
Never Forget.
Maybe part of keeping that promise is making sure we remember to tell them.