The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  Something terrible had happened. Life was reduced to its essentials. Time was short. People said what counted, what mattered. It has been noted that there is no record of anyone calling to say “I never liked you,” or “You hurt my feelings.” No one negotiated past grievances or said “Vote for Smith.” Amazingly—or not—there is no record of anyone damning the terrorists or saying “I hate them.”

  No one said anything unneeded, extraneous or small. Crisis is a great editor. When you read the transcripts that have been released over the years, it’s all so clear.

  Flight 93 flight attendant Ceecee Lyles, 33 years old, in an answering-machine message to her husband: “Please tell my children that I love them very much. I’m sorry, baby. I wish I could see your face again.”

  Thirty-one-year-old Melissa Harrington, a California-based trade consultant at a meeting in the Towers, called her father to say she loved him. Minutes later she left a message on the answering machine as her new husband slept in their San Francisco home. “Sean, it’s me,” she said. “I just wanted to let you know I love you.”

  Capt. Walter Hynes of the New York Fire Department’s Ladder 13 dialed home that morning as his rig left the firehouse at 85th Street and Lexington Avenue. He was on his way downtown, he said in his message, and things were bad. “I don’t know if we’ll make it out. I want to tell you that I love you and I love the kids.”

  Firemen don’t become firemen because they’re pessimists. Imagine being a guy who feels in his gut he’s going to his death, and he calls on the way to say goodbye and make things clear. His widow later told the Associated Press she’d played his message hundreds of times and made copies for their kids. “He was thinking about us in those final moments.”

  Elizabeth Rivas saw it that way, too. When her husband left for the World Trade Center that morning, she went to a Laundromat, where she heard the news. She couldn’t reach him by cell and rushed home. He’d called at 9:02 and reached her daughter. The child reported, “He say, mommy, he say he love you no matter what happens, he loves you.” He never called again. Mrs. Rivas later said, “He tried to call me. He called me.”

  There was the amazing acceptance. I spoke this week with a medical doctor who told me she’d seen many people die, and many “with grace and acceptance.” The people on the planes didn’t have time to accept, to reflect, to think through; and yet so many showed the kind of grace you see in a hospice.

  Peter Hanson, a passenger on United Airlines Flight 175, called his father. “I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building,” he said. “Don’t worry, Dad—if it happens, it will be very fast.” On the same flight, Brian Sweeney called his wife, got the answering machine and told her they’d been hijacked. “Hopefully I’ll talk to you again, but if not, have a good life. I know I’ll see you again some day.”

  There was Tom Burnett’s famous call from United Flight 93. “We’re all going to die, but three of us are going to do something,” he told his wife, Deena. “I love you, honey.”

  These were people saying, essentially, In spite of my imminent death, my thoughts are on you, and on love. I asked a psychiatrist the other day for his thoughts, and he said the people on the planes and in the Towers were “accepting the inevitable” and taking care of “unfinished business.” “At death’s door people pass on a responsibility—‘Tell Billy I never stopped loving him and forgave him long ago.’ ‘Take care of Mom.’ ‘Pray for me, Father. Pray for me, I haven’t been very good.’” They address what needs doing.

  This reminded me of that moment when Todd Beamer of United 93 wound up praying on the phone with a woman he’d never met before, a Verizon Airfone supervisor named Lisa Jefferson. She said later that his tone was calm. It seemed as if they were “old friends,” she later wrote. They said the Lord’s Prayer together. Then he said, “Let’s roll.”

  * * *

  This is what I get from the last messages. People are often stronger than they know, bigger, more gallant than they’d guess. And this: We’re all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot it won’t make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed.

  I think the sound of the last messages, of what was said, will live as long in human history, and contain within it as much of human history, as any old metallic roar.

  Eleven/9/11

  The Wall Street Journal: September 11, 2012

  It was a beautiful day, that’s what everyone remembers. So clear, so crisp, so bright. It sparkled as I walked my 14-year-old son out to go to the subway that would take him to his new high school, in Brooklyn. He was now a commuter: a walk to the 86th Street subway station and then the 4 or 5 train downtown near the Towers and over the river. That was about 7:30 in the morning. It was beautiful at noon when I went to mass at St. Thomas More church on 89th Street. And between those two events, his departure and the mass, the world had changed, changed utterly. After mass, at the rise of 86th Street, the day was so clear you could see all the way downtown to the towering debris cloud.

  But it was beautiful. That was one of the heartbreaking elements.

  * * *

  The things I will never forget. Looking up at a silent TV screen as I returned email at my computer. Seeing a long-distance shot of the World Trade Center with smoke coming out of the side. Putting up the sound. Hearing a food cart vendor with a heavy accent saying to a reporter on the scene: “That was no small plane, that was a big jet, a jumbo jet.” Knowing it was true. Hearing the TV chatter that a pilot might have accidentally hit the Tower. Knowing it was not true. Grabbing the phone to call my son’s school to make sure he had arrived, that he’d gotten there safe, that he hadn’t tarried or gotten off downtown to walk around because it was a beautiful day. Busy signal. Again. Busy. Calling a friend whose husband often worked downtown. No, she said, he’s in London. Talking with her as we watched the screen together and then the second plane went in, right before our eyes, and there was no denying what it was. Calling school. Busy. And then the phones went down.

  And then the buildings fell. That was the thing, they heaved up and groaned to the ground and brought a world with them. We could have taken it if the buildings didn’t fall. That’s why the day was so uniquely a New York trauma, for all that happened in Washington and Pennsylvania: The buildings went down and we saw it. My friends saw the jumpers, who fled the flames. To this day they don’t talk about it. My friend saw the faces of the passengers on the first plane, so low did they fly by his building. He saw their faces in the passenger windows. He never told anyone about that, including his wife, until two years ago.

  Hearing that 20,000 or 30,000 people might have been in the buildings. Hearing something about the firemen—a lot of them died, a lot of them tried to charge up the stairs to the fire. The man standing on line in Murphy’s Market after mass. He was covered in Pompeii ash. He had walked uptown. He was standing there in shock with a bottle of water and a banana. The bad boys who hung out near a local school and were said to sell drugs: They took their big boom box and put in on the steps so people walking by could sit down and hear what was happening. I sat down and listened and when I left I said, “Thank you, gentlemen,” and they nodded because they knew: They’d been gentlemen.

  And, funnily, such a blur of images so vivid that years later you think you actually saw them when you didn’t. A few days after the attack, I read of someone seeing a transit worker or policeman in a car downtown, parked and motionless, and he had on the radio and it was blaring “Heroes,” and he was crying. I remembered it a few years later and found the Peter Gabriel version. “I can remember / Standing by the wall… And we kissed as if nothing could fall… We can be heroes… just for one day.” It still makes me weep, and when I hear it I see the transit worker or cop again, even though I never saw him.

  * * *

  Worried sick about my son and no way to reach him. And then miraculously the dead phone rang, at 3 p.m. My 14-year-old on the line at the ph
one at the school that was working that moment, other students crowded behind him. I am fine, he said, but we still don’t know everything that happened, tell me what you know. “It was Arab terrorists,” I said. And he muffled the phone and I heard him announce to the kids, “It was terrorism, an Arab group.”

  “It appears to be over,” I said.

  “The attack is over, it appears to be all over,” he said. On it went as I filled him in and he filled them in. He told them the Towers and the Pentagon were hit but not the State Department, that was a rumor. He was calm, collected, in the middle of history.

  He told me he would not get home tonight, all the bridges closed and public transportation stopped, he’d stay over, with some Manhattanite students, at a teacher’s house, he’d be home some time tomorrow, he’ll be fine, don’t worry.

  He made it home the next day about noon. And he told me what he’d seen. The subway from Brooklyn to the city curved up over the East River, and everyone on it always turned to look at sparkling, majestic downtown Manhattan. And this day they all turned and they saw the dead cloud, the lost empty buildings, and they all went Oh. A long soft sigh: Oooohhhhh.

  There is an unwritten story in how brave our children were that day, and have been since, and what that day was to them. But those who were adolescents or early teenagers on 9/11: They never talk about it. They took it all in but they never talk about it.

  * * *

  As for me, I notice that in the early years after 9/11, when they did their replays of the event on the news, I always used to watch with some kind of pain that was being worked out while it was being reexperienced. But now I can’t watch. Because it causes some kind of pain that is not going to be worked out, and that has to do more with what followed that day than the day itself.

  But I want to end with the beauty of that day, and a parallel. I have been reading Paul Fussell’s “The Great War and Modern Memory.” He notes that those who were there remembered the summer of 1914, the months just before the start of World War I, as the most beautiful of their lives. Bright, clear, stormless—no sign of the harrowing trenches just around the corner, of the 7,000 a day who would be wounded or killed on the Somme alone, among British troops alone. “All agree that the prewar summer was the most idyllic for many years. It was warm and sunny, eminently pastoral.” For the great writers who would fight the war, it was carefree, innocent. Siegfried Sassoon “was busy fox hunting,” Robert Graves climbing mountains in Wales, Wilfred Owen tutoring French boys in English near Bordeaux. “For the modern imagination that last summer has assumed the status of a permanent symbol for anything innocently but irrecoverably lost.”

  Like that beautiful September day, like dawn on September 11, 2001.

  * * *

  So that was my 9/11. The boy who returned, the world that was ended, the pictures that will never leave your mind. Like this one: A few weeks later I was pouring coffee for construction workers at St. Paul’s church downtown and a guy came in and introduced himself. He was a member of the Iron Workers Local 40. They were dismantling the bottom of the Towers. He read my columns online, he said. He took his coffee and came back later and in his hand was a paper bag and in the bag were a heavy little heart and a heavy little cross, just cut from the North Tower. “I want you to have these,” he said. As I write they are on my desk, in front of me, burnt and bent, but there.

  A Masterpiece of a Museum

  The Wall Street Journal: May 23, 2014

  New York’s new 9/11 museum is a masterpiece. It is the first big thing built to mark that day that is fully worthy of it.

  It also struck me as a departure from a growing style among those who create and tend historic sites. That style involves the banishment of meaning—of the particular, of the real and tangible, even of the human. The plaques on landmarked buildings often tell us of the architectural school under which the edifice was created but little of the great man or woman born there. A few weeks ago, during a visit to the occasional residence of a former American president, a museum official noted with pride the lack of furniture—no chair the president sat in, or bureau he used. Such personal artifacts, she said, would only distract visitors from pondering the sublime greatness of the president’s achievements. Absence creates a space in which the past can be fully contemplated.

  Actually presence is likelier to prompt contemplation. Meaning matters; things that are real and tangible are moving. A single bullet dug from the ground of Gettysburg can tell you as much about what that battle was, the sheer bloody horror of it, as a chapter of a book. People know this naturally, which is why Gettysburg years ago had to stop people from digging around. They were tearing the place apart.

  Physical reality is crucial in understanding history. The bullet says the battle was real.

  The physicality of things is why people collect autographs: “His hand touched this, his eye considered this document.” It’s why Catholics keep relics of saints, why people collect mementos of all sorts. It’s why it was so thrilling when they found the Titanic in 1985. “It was real, it all happened, there it is. There’s the door of the grand salon.”

  The street-level World Trade Center memorial site—the gleaming buildings and reflective pools—seems to me part of the modern trend. There are no heroic statues, nothing to tell us what the firemen did. In the imagination of curators and historical custodians, the Higher Blankness gives us space in which to contemplate meaning. Instead we see emptiness and it feels… empty, bled of import.

  But belowground the new museum is a masterpiece of particularity. Everything in it says the real and physical does matter, and what happened on that day—the facts of it, the meaning of it, who did what and how, who survived and died—matters.

  It is a true history of the day and its aftermath. You see the ruined fire truck from Ladder Company 3. The helmet of a fireman. The red bandanna that Welles Crowther, a young equities trader, wore when he lost his life saving others in the South Tower. There are things picked from the debris like bullets from the field at Gettysburg: a woman’s purse, her eyeglasses, the shoes a man wore as he fled the collapse. The early reports on TV, the “missing” posters, mass cards. The cross at Ground Zero, the votive candles, the tridents, the slurry wall, the survivors’ staircase, which people in the buildings walked down to safety. And the posters and poems and banners and flags and funeral cards that were suddenly all over the city as New York, in the days and weeks after, began to come back.

  What a relief to see history treated as something with meaning.

  After I went a friend made a face and asked if it was sad. Amazingly enough, it was not. It was moving, stirring and at moments painful, but not sad. Because you are moved by it, you wind up with a mild case of what Tom Wolfe called information compulsion. You see something—a collection of papers that fluttered from the Towers as they burned—and it evokes a world of memory, and you find yourself saying aloud, “I remember,” and, “That day I saw a man covered in ashes waiting patiently on line at my grocery uptown in the 90s—he’d made it all the way up and was standing there in ashes waiting to pay for a bottle of water.”

  Because the museum does not dodge reality but shows you what really happened, you wind up reflective. Contemplative in a way that blankness does not engender.

  All of it is presented coherently, sensitively, intelligently—nothing vulgar or sentimental, nothing exploitative. The space itself is massive, which underscores the brute massiveness of the event. The lighting is intensely targeted but not harsh, just bright where it needs to be. Someone did beautiful sound design—turn this corner and you hear the EMT operators trying to deal with a flood of unbelievable data, turn that corner and it’s the wailing bagpipes at a fireman’s funeral.

  It is all just so real, and done with such exquisite respect for the human beings who were there and wound up that day enmeshed in history.

  The memorial and museum cost about $700 million combined. A press officer notes the nonprofit foundation that overse
es both does not receive city, state or federal funding.

  The admission price is high, $24 for adults. I mentioned this to a press representative who later noted that family members of those who died, and the families of rescue and recovery workers, are admitted free, and there are free hours for the public Tuesdays from 5 to 8 p.m.

  There has been a controversy about the gift shop, which is said to be cheesy, and undignified. The criticism was led by local politicians who didn’t like the T-shirts and jewelry, the NYPD dog vests and little bronze earrings.

  I always sit up and listen when New York City pols call something crass, because they’d know, right?

  But is the criticism fair? The Oklahoma City Memorial Museum, the Holocaust Museum, Gettysburg and other sites also have gift shops that sell trinkets and books. All are meant to support maintenance and operations, which at the 9/11 site will cost an estimated $60 million a year.

  Gift shops also exist because people want something to remind them of the day and what they saw. When they buy something with “9/11” on it, they are remembering it, and asking you to remember, too. And cheesiness is in the eye of the beholder. When I was 10 or so I went to a historical museum and the gift shop sold cheap renderings of the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation. I bought them and taped them all over my room. I’d have bought Independence Hall earrings too if I could.

  Kids like things that remind them of something important. So do grown-ups. Although I suppose we’re all supposed to think big abstract thoughts and never indulge our need for the tangible, for something you can hold in your hand.

  I’m sorry, but stop. You’re in the middle of a masterpiece. The shop helps pay the bills. Leave it alone.

  We’re all so used to being disappointed at 9/11-related memorials that we think criticism must be the only legitimate response. At this point it’s a reflex.