9/11: What 25 years taught me about strength

A special editorial for the 25th anniversary of 9/11

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was studying for a statistics examination at NYU, where I had just begun my MBA. Our 24th-floor apartment in Jersey City looked directly across the Hudson toward the Twin Towers.

A call from my mother-in-law in Paris drew me to the window. Both towers were in flames. I remember thinking that the steel could not withstand such heat. Then I watched them fall.

I had arrived in the United States only a year earlier. Until then, choosing America had felt like choosing possibility and the security of a powerful nation. As the towers disappeared, so did that certainty. For the first time, I wondered whether coming had been a mistake.

I briefly reached my husband before the connection was lost. Later that day, I watched people moving silently through Jersey City, covered in dust. A triage center had been prepared on the waterfront for those escaping Lower Manhattan. Medical teams waited for large numbers of seriously injured survivors who never came. By the next day, I watched the center being dismantled.

September 11 unfolded in minutes. Its consequences have unfolded over 25 years.

Looking back, I see two timelines. The first belongs to what the world witnessed that morning. The second is quieter and still unfinished: grief, illness, trauma, recovery, and lives permanently divided into before and after.

The attacks changed how we lived. We moved farther from New York, seeking greater safety in the suburbs. We no longer entered crowds and large public gatherings with the same innocence. September 11 also revived memories of a terrorist attack we had experienced in Paris in 1995, when a close friend lost his wife. What had once seemed exceptional now felt possible anywhere.

Terrorism changes more than borders, security systems, and foreign policy. It enters millions of ordinary decisions: where to live, whether to join a crowd, what to notice in a railway station, and how safe to feel in places once entered without thought. September 11 did not introduce terrorism to the world, but it made vulnerability visible at a scale – and in a place – many had thought unimaginable.

Eight years later, we returned to Jersey City. This time, we lived on the 46th floor, again overlooking the Hudson. We had not forgotten, but neither had we allowed fear to determine where or how we would live.

That distinction matters. Vigilance helps us recognize danger. Fear can persuade us to organize our lives around it.

As a physician, I was struck by a 20-year study of nearly 13,000 World Trade Center responders. It confirmed something I had also observed in life: trauma does not move through everyone in the same way. Many responders remained resilient or improved. Others lived with persistent symptoms, while a smaller group worsened over time. Recovery has no common calendar, and visible strength does not mean that suffering has ended.

We also learned that even the instinct to help must be tempered by humility. Psychological debriefing was once believed to be beneficial, yet pressing people to recount trauma before they were ready could sometimes intensify distress. Good intentions are not the same as good care.

I sometimes wonder whether nations, like individuals, can organize their future around trauma. After 9/11, we witnessed extraordinary courage and solidarity. We also saw how fear could shape decisions whose consequences extended far beyond that morning. Honest remembrance must hold both truths.

Twenty-five years later, I no longer understand strength as invulnerability. No individual and no country can prevent every catastrophe. Strength is revealed in what follows: whether fear defines the future and whether care continues after the world has turned its attention elsewhere.

Hope does not require us to believe that tragedy inevitably makes us stronger. Some losses can never be redeemed. It lies in learning to recognize suffering more clearly and respond to it more wisely.

Twenty-five years later, remembrance asks more of us than looking back. It asks us to keep seeing what remains – and to keep caring for those who continue to suffer.