The Tribute in Light
September 11th, 2001. We say we remember, as to not forget those who died. We often forget to remember those who survived.
September 11th, 2001. We say we remember, as to not forget those who died. We often forget to remember those who survived. Surviving comes with the burden of memory of a time the world tries to forget. Below is my mother’s story, in her own words. I edited parts for clarity. My thoughts on the installation can be found at the end.
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I was on vacation with my husband and two young children in Telluride, Colorado in the days preceding 9/11/2001. We returned to New York City on 9/10/2001. I often wonder how life would have turned out if we had been stranded in Telluride.
That Monday, we got home to our apartment in Tribeca three quarters of a mile from the World Trade Center. On a walk, I hurried around an old man because he seemed drunk and unsteady. He veered into the stroller, fell, and cracked his head on the sidewalk. His head bled profusely. He was taken to St Vincent’s hospital. I called the hospital in the morning to see how he was. No answer. The hospital was soon to be overflowing with victims.
We had very big windows with an unobstructed view of the North tower. The kids loved to look out the window at the towers and at the Travelers insurance building, which they called the “red umbrella building”. It used to be lit up every day. It turned off forever after September 11th, I assume so as not to be a target.
One of the only recollections of the day, as most memories are unretrievable, was the giant cracking sound of the first plane hitting. I was vacuuming and because we lived on a loud street, I recall thinking that it was louder than most trucks driving on our cobblestone street. My husband was walking our dog with my 2-year-old son, and they showed me the giant plane shaped hole where the first plane hit.
My husband decided to “go to work” which was across the street from the towers. He really wanted to see, look. Then the second plane hit. He didn’t come back for two hours. There were no phones. Only panic. He described one of the plane engines a couple blocks away. Mostly he talked about “the shoes” all over the place. Two shoes for every person, 5506 to be exact, not including the ones running for their lives.
My mother called before the phones went dead and said I should collect some debris. Dreadful. I boiled water.
Our neighborhood was evacuated but we stayed until night so that, after the kids went to bed, I could go to one of the makeshift hospitals at Chelsea Piers. Most people had died or gone to city hospitals. I saw my attending doctor whom I respected. He was trying to resuscitate someone. We locked eyes across the room. I will never forget their intensity and heaviness. We were healers who couldn’t do much.
My friend/neighbor in the building had a small company in the World Trade Center. They all perished except for her. She got in the elevator because she was on the 60th floor but it went up. She had to walk down 80 flights of stairs. She was fit. Others could not make the descent. She had to step over and leave them. She eventually had to go to hospital because her cat scratched her so badly while she tried to get it in a crate. She had to go to the hospital and see more carnage. I never saw her smile again.
My good friend lived in my building. We decided to walk around the city. There were tanks and the military everywhere.
About a week later, I walked the couple long blocks to see the damage. I was hit by a wall of stench that repelled me backward. I was standing near our grocery store, and I told myself it must be the rotting meat. Only recently did it dawn on me that, no, it was rotting atomized bodies and toxins burning. I often wonder how much others’ DNA I inhaled.
Fortunately, I already switched residency programs from one in Brooklyn to one in Manhattan because I wanted to be on the island with my children in case the World Trade Center was bombed again. Good foresight or fatalist, you pick. My commute to residency required me to take two trains to the Upper East Side, which is a fair distance from the Lower West Side. Because ground zero was a massive cleanup zone and blocked off, my nanny was late to work frequently. I was also often late, mostly because of the bomb threats on the subway. It would go pitch black underground. Then the anthrax threats abounded. Hold my breath! I was threatened with extra overnight calls for being late. I don’t think I would have obliged. The hospital and staff seemed unaffected. I called it the La la land of the Upper East Side. I suppose we all suffer differently. The hospital and fellow doctors never asked me if I was ok. I was the only one who lived downtown.
I went darker.
On my last day of my ICU rotation, we had a patient come in with anthrax. I was glad not to attend to them. Residents weren’t given special considerations. I thought of helping but I had two babies at home. I got online to buy anthrax masks. My husband said that was ridiculous.
Then the paranoia. The “Muslims were whispering”. “This was the beginning of World War III.”
It was an inside job. Giuliani, the mayor at the time, rented out building 7 and stored diesel gasoline there. His excuse was in case there was another bombing he could escape. It didn’t really make sense. The building burned in less than two hours.
The EPA director lied and reported that the air was safe, so I took my kids to their music lessons. Asbestos fibers littered the streets. My son was in the stroller, so he probably inhaled more fibers than my daughter who was in the back carrier. He has a chronic cough now. We had to walk over a mile to the next closest playground for two years. Our neighborhood community dissolved.
NY1 played the scene of the towers collapsing repeatedly every day for a year. There was also the video of the woman who jumped from the tower. She seemed to be courageous but was just burning. The emotional trauma of that was one of the most damaging for me.
My husband’s office building had a large gash, and it took ten years of litigation to decide to knock it down or repair it. The bank closed. He was laid off.
Pictures of deceased loved ones muraled every street for years. Nowhere to escape. People left the city. We couldn’t because I had a year left of residency.
The fires smoldered for a year. Tanks and barges abounded. Debris and DNA of 2,753 people took years to clean up. It was mostly loaded into barges and taken to Jersey. Sometimes I would look at it. Some people stood around hoping to catch a glimpse of some remains of loved ones. More shoes. Someone found a wedding ring. The inscription was no longer legible.
I met a woman with two children at our kids’ store in the neighborhood. Her face was a gray yellow, not a color I’d ever seen, even as a doctor. Later the owner told me she had lost her husband, brother, and brother-in-law.
On the one-year anniversary, I had the day off to spend with my babies who were now one and three. The three of us being together gave me a small feeling of peace, hope and spirituality that I so desperately needed. We did our usual trek to the next closest playground in the West Village. We found pasta shaped like peace signs. We rushed home because it became windy. At home we looked out our favorite window. The sun was bright. There was more light without the towers. The wind gales were huge. Full, industrial size trash bags raced down the street. There were maybe 100, maybe 2,753 plastic white bags floating and dancing outside, almost playfully. I believed the bags were the souls of the victims. They were saying, “we are in a better place, don’t worry!”
Photos of the aftermath imprint on me and for a decade every time I looked at a clock and usually twice a day it reads 9:11. Jump! My husband and I grew apart, stopped talking, and we moved to Denver for a job. Isolation was palpable. There is a point when you have so many life stressors it’s hard to recover. I didn’t smile for a year. He would say snap out of it. My son didn’t say airplane for a year. My mother-in-law said, “you should smile more.”
We purchased a condo in Telluride. It could have been great. Instead, I ran away to the mountains, left the husband I loved, the father of my children. We were going to move together but I gave up. After a few months, I returned to Denver to co-parent. He remarried quickly, moved back to NYC, and had three kids. I repented and regretted my selfishness. I have now found a supportive community in Telluride.
We all survived. For now. Cancer risk is real. The four most common are thyroid (likely from the lightbulb mercury from the thousands of lightbulbs), breast, prostate, lung, and leukemia.
My husband, children and I are all in the WTC registry. We would get surveys about mental and physical health every three months for years and still get them annually. There were a lot of questions about marriage and marital problems. Impending doom. We also get the token annual holiday card written in ten languages. I think they missed a few; there were probably a hundred languages spoken in the WTC.
For the last couple years, we got glossy, oddly upbeat periodicals telling us how much the registry has done to treat cancer victims. One article was about a 30-year-old woman. There was a picture of her at ten years old playing violin. She would play every day at ground zero for survivors seeking answers because the EPA said it was safe to breathe. They boasted about paying for her chemo. She died. Not upbeat nor a selling point. Just a new trigger.
At first there was money allocated for mental health services. It quickly dried up. I had briefly seen a psychiatrist who said I had bipolar based on manic episodes manifesting as anger. Depression. She never addressed 9/11. It turns out the diagnosis was complex PTSD. My default was anger which didn’t make me many friends in town. I had to pretend to be normal, go to school, sporting events, smile, and be a good doctor. Keep it together. Snap out of it, stifle it. Smile more!
Two years ago, I started therapy doing EMDR which is one of the most effective ways of treating trauma. The goal of EMDR is to retrieve and connect your memories and stop the persevering trauma reels. Thousands of reels over multiple traumas. Holding me back. Holding my breath. I just want the memories of my children’s childhood back, despite the risk that memories of that day would resurface. I continued for a few months until it got too intense. An electrocution of the brain. I settled on conventional talk therapy with hopes of trying again. Maybe happy reels can replace some of the non-self-serving ones.
I have tried for 25 years to see the silver lining. I haven’t found one. We survived but forever changed. I missed out on things, and I know I will never fully recover. I lived. I did not starve; I had water so my eyes could produce tears. My babies weren’t killed, nor burned, nor limbs severed. I had shelter. There were only two “bombs” not thousands. Not every day. I had a country that could provide a sense of security that I would be rescued.
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Friday, September 11th, 2026 was the first anniversary where I knew the impact of 9/11 on my family. My mother sent me the preceding text as an email in October 2025. I re-read it while standing at the Harlem Meer. I sobbed and my body convulsed.
The lights in a Tribute in Light are the glint of what could have been. A glint of a family that could have remained whole. A sliver of light creeping through the doorway of a life without helplessly watching my parents suffer, in their own ways, with the trauma of memory.
There is nothing we can do to change the past. Dwelling on what could have been is detrimental to fully experiencing the present. There are so many remarkable people and formative experiences my family and I would have never encountered if not for 9/11.
Life is the universe’s greatest gift; if we are able to love and cherish each moment, we disservice ourselves by not doing so. My time staring at the Tribute in Light was a full, corporeal recognition of these truths.
Life is finite and can end at any moment. I could have lost my father on that day; he had a meeting scheduled in the towers that his colleague called off. I did not. I live in gratitude and enjoy the moments I am with him. As I do with my mother. Despite exhaustion and stress, I travelled to Colorado the weekend before the 25th anniversary of 9/11 to be with her. To hug her. To let her know I love her. Words were not enough. Sometimes we do things that we cannot explain, but feel the need to do in our body.
Love and gratitude are two lights we all have within us. With acknowledgment, they will shine eternally.
Installation Location: Roof of the Battery Parking Garage, dusk to dawn 09/11
Location Seen: Harlem Meer
Time Spent with the Work: 25 years
Percent of article written by AI: 0 %
First published on Substack, September 20, 2026.