Darkness Doesn't Get The Last Word

I still vividly remember where I was on the morning of September 11, 2001.

I served on the PTA Board at my kids' school, and we were having our monthly board meeting in the school library after dropping my sons off for the day. The television was on, and one of the other parents said, “It looks like a plane crashed into one of the Twin Towers!”

We all turned toward the TV, and I remember saying a silent prayer for the people suffering through what I thought was a terrible accident.

Then the second plane hit. A third hit the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed in an open field as passengers and crew refused to allow their plane to become another weapon of destruction and fought together against the hijackers.

My husband was out of the country on business, so I immediately signed my boys out of school. I called my neighbor and asked him to pick up my sister and brother from their respective schools. I didn't know what was happening or when it would stop. I just wanted everybody home.

My older sons were only six and seven years old, and my third was a toddler. Before 9/11, I didn't give them handheld video games because we limited technology in our home. But that day, I wanted to delay exposing my babies to the ugliness that was unfolding for as long as I could.

So they got a surprise “just because” gift—Nintendo Gameboys, and played while the adults in my family gathered around the television trying to wrap our minds around what we were seeing.

My husband was trying to get home, but he couldn't. The planes had been grounded and the borders were closed. And the news just kept getting worse.

Buildings collapsing. Hijacked planes. People jumping from the windows of the Twin Towers.

And then, in the middle of all of that, I heard about the Children's Discovery Center.

There was a daycare center on the ground floor at 5 World Trade Center, and the teachers had gotten the children out. They carried babies and toddlers, pushed them in shopping carts and walked for miles trying to get them somewhere safe. Ultimately, every child was safely reunited with their family.

I became fixated on that story.

Maybe because I was sitting there trying to protect my own children from even seeing what was happening, while these teachers were in the middle of it, doing everything they could to protect other people's babies.

In the middle of so much grief, horror and heartbreak, those teachers were a light that I could hold onto and believe that the world wasn’t going to be lost to terror, hate, death, and chaos.

Twenty-five years later, I still hold it as a core memory of that time.

9/11 showed us that there is great wickedness in this world. There is no way to soften that truth.

But I refuse to give darkness the last word.

There were people running into buildings while everyone else was trying to get out. People helping strangers. People carrying other people's children. People choosing, in the middle of something absolutely horrific, to take care of each other.

Acknowledging that doesn't disregard the pain, grief, heartbreak and loss that so many still live with. Every time we remember the people who showed up with love, courage, kindness and humanity in the middle of it, their light is still here.

That's part of how we keep the darkness from winning.

We honor the light. We carry it with us. And when given the choice, we try to be some light too

Watch the story that stayed with me:
Chaos and Escape: How Day Care Teachers Saved Dozens of Children on 9/11 — Retro Report