Twenty-five years.
It is strange how time changes everything, and yet leaves certain moments untouched.
The anniversary of September 11 has made me think about that. Twenty-five years also happens to approximate the length of my career at Capital Health Plan. I had only just begun working there in July 2001. I was still finding my way, settling into my office at Governor’s Square, beginning what I could not then have known would become one of the defining chapters of my life.
And then came September 11.
I remember that morning vividly.
There were no televisions in our offices. There were no sophisticated cell phones delivering breaking-news alerts every few seconds. Social media, as we know it today, did not exist. In many ways, we were isolated from what was happening beyond the walls of the clinic.
Our patients became our windows to the outside world.
Someone would come in and tell us that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. Then another patient brought another piece of news. Another plane. Another tower. Washington. Pennsylvania.
Fragments of an unimaginable story arrived through the people walking into our examination rooms.
And still, we continued seeing patients.
That detail has always stayed with me. The world had changed, although I don’t think any of us yet understood how profoundly, and there we were doing what we had come to work to do. Patients needed to be seen. Illness had not suspended itself because history was unfolding elsewhere.
We worked until the end of the day.
On my drive home, I turned on the radio. There was nothing else. Every station seemed consumed by what had happened.
Then I arrived home and turned on the television.
Only then did I truly see it.
The planes.
The towers.
The smoke.
People running through streets covered in ash.
And eventually, those enormous buildings collapsing into themselves.
I remember thinking about the depravity of which human beings are capable.
Evil does not always announce itself with horns and banners. Sometimes it begins in ordinary places—in grievance, hatred, resentment, fanaticism, the gradual dehumanization of another person.
Evil springs from common places if we give it the capacity to grow.
When we water evil, it flowers.
And on September 11, 2001, the world witnessed its terrible bloom.
But behind the images and the numbers were human beings.
A husband who kissed his wife goodbye that morning and never came home.
A mother who left for work expecting to see her children that evening.
A wife.
A son.
A daughter.
A grandparent.
Thousands of ordinary lives interrupted in the middle of ordinary days.
There were children who went to school that morning with two parents and returned to a world in which one was suddenly gone. Those children are adults now. They have negotiated adolescence, college, careers, marriages, parenthood and the thousand small decisions of life without the guidance of someone who should have been there.
Twenty-five years does not restore what was taken from them.
And then there were the first responders.
Firefighters running upward while others were running down. Police officers, paramedics and ordinary citizens moving toward danger because someone they did not know needed help.
Some died that day.
Others survived only to discover that September 11 had not finished with them. Years later, many would suffer illnesses associated with what they breathed and encountered in those ruins.
The casualties of that morning did not end when the smoke cleared.
I have always believed September 11 was a day I would never forget. I hope the nation never forgets it either—not simply because of what was done to us, but because of what we briefly became afterward.
For a moment, the distinctions that so often consume us seemed smaller.
We were frightened. We were grieving. We were angry.
But we were also together.
Over the years I have come to believe that what is best about us is us—what becomes possible when we remember that, despite all our disagreements, we belong to one another.
Perhaps that is what I miss most when I look at the country today.
That sense of common purpose.
That instinct to reach toward rather than retreat from one another.
That understanding that another person’s suffering diminishes all of us.
Oh, how I long for that again.
Twenty-five years have passed.
In almost exactly that span of time, I began a career, practiced medicine, cared for thousands of people, grew older, watched my children become adults, and eventually walked away from the office for the last time.
A quarter of a century.
Long enough for an entire life to change.
And yet I can still see that young physician sitting in his office at Governor’s Square, hearing fragments of terrible news from the patients coming through his door.
Perhaps that is the peculiar nature of memory.
Time moves.
We move with it.
But some days refuse to move at all.
September 11 is one of those days.
It reminds us of the depths to which human beings can descend. But it also reminds us of the heights to which ordinary people can rise.
Both possibilities live within us.
Hatred can be cultivated.
So can compassion.
Division can be fed.
So can community.
Evil can be watered.
But so can hope.
And perhaps that remains our responsibility—to decide, individually and collectively, what we choose to water.
Twenty-five years later, I still believe there is more goodness in us than hatred, more capacity to build than destroy, more that binds us together than separates us.
The world is broken.
It always has been.
But hope remains.
Simply O.
