Twenty Five Years, and the Sun Still Rises

A reflection on 9/11, memory, and the strange math of time passing faster than we can imagine

It has been twenty five years since 9/11.

Twenty five years. How is that even possible? Better yet, where did they go? 

I keep turning the number over like it might explain itself, and it never does.

I was thirty four that day, with two small children. And when I look back honestly, 9/11 was one of the most significant tragedies to shape my life, but it was not the only one.

9/11, 2001. 

Divorce, 2004. 

Sandy Hook, 2012. (Not because it was the only mass shooting, but it was the one in my backyard. They have all broken my heart, but this one gutted me.)

Covid, 2020.

That is how time marks itself for me. Not in years exactly, but in the events that split a time before from a time after. Births, deaths, achievements, endings, becoming. So many other significant moments, world, domestic and quietly personal events, stacked on top of each other until they became the shape of a life.

9/11 feels like yesterday. But it wasn’t.

Twenty five years ago my mother was a year shy of the age I am now. 

Twenty five years ago I had not yet gotten divorced. 

Twenty five years ago my sons were four and six, small enough to carry, and now they are men with lives that belong entirely to them.

I cannot believe how quickly twenty five years went by. But here’s the thing about a day that stops time. While time stood still that morning, it also kept moving, because that is what time does. The sun went down that night. It rose again the next morning. And it has risen every morning since, over a world that changed, and over lives, mine included, that kept unfolding whether I was ready or not.

It has been a magical, heartbreaking, frightening, exhilarating ride.

We look back on time the way we look back on everything, through nostalgia, through curiosity, sometimes through judgment we didn't earn the right to hold, and always through bias, because the person remembering is never the same person who lived it. I look back at thirty four year old me and I am tender with her in some places and hard on her in others. That is not a flaw in memory. That is just what memory is.

Sitting here in 2026, I can see how far we have come, and how much farther there is to go.

Some things have changed for the good, many incredible shifts that astound me. Some things have changed in ways that make me want to weep.

I still mourn the people who lost their lives that day. Twenty five years later, their memories are still held, whole and specific, in my heart. Not as a headline anymore. As people. As the mothers and fathers and children who were simply living their Tuesday morning when the world came apart.

The trick, I think, is learning to be held by this exact moment, today, while still understanding how precious and how finite it all is. Not rushing past it looking for the next one. Not staying so long in what was that I miss what is. Twenty five years is a long time to carry something, and it is also no time at all.

And still, here we are, watching the sun do the one thing it has never once failed to do.