Mothers and Fathers: Twenty five years since September 11
By Jeff Bingham, President
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Psalm 46:1
I was in Chicago that morning, at the Sheraton on the river, there for a conference that was supposed to start in about an hour. I was in the bathroom getting ready when Jake’s mother said a plane had flown into the World Trade Center.
My first thought was a small plane. A Cessna, something like that. Some fellow had a heart attack at the controls, or got turned around, and there had been a terrible accident. That is what I believed for the next few minutes, and it is what most people believed.
Then the second plane, and there was no version of it left that was an accident.
The conference never happened. The speakers were coming from New York and were not coming. People stood in the lobby trying to reach family. Downtown Chicago emptied out. Nobody knew what was next, and the tall buildings were the ones you wanted to be away from. There were fighter planes over the city.
I said something about all the talent that had just been lost in those buildings. I meant it. I had shaken David Alger’s hand two years before, and his firm was gone that morning, nearly all of it.
Somebody standing there with me corrected me. She said it was not the talent that was lost. It was the mothers and the fathers and the sons and the daughters.
She was not telling me anything I did not already know. I was a father of two small children standing in that lobby. She just put it back in front of me, and it has stayed in front of me for twenty five years.
They read the names every year. I listen for his. I only met him one time, but it makes it real.
Here is the part I have thought about more as I have gotten older. While all those mothers and fathers were running out of those buildings, other mothers and fathers were running into them. Firefighters. Police officers. Paramedics. People with families at home, who went up the stairs while everybody else came down. They knew better than anybody what they were walking into. They went anyway.
The men on the plane over Pennsylvania had no job. Nobody trained them and nobody sent them. They were passengers. They got their wives and mothers on the phone, learned what was happening on the ground, took a vote, and one of them said let’s roll. Then they went up the aisle.
Jake was six and Jessica was four. They were at my mom and dad’s, and what should have been a few days turned into a week. The planes were grounded. There were no rental cars. I called the Toyota dealership back home to see if they could get a dealer up there to sell me a car so I could just drive out of town. It did not work out. The kids were fine, they were with their grandparents, and what they remember is that we did not come home when we were supposed to. What I remember is a week of trying to get to the same state as my children, and knowing there were thousands of people who would never get to theirs.
We finally got a one way rental and I drove it home in a day. Six hundred miles, and there were American flags on the overpasses the whole way. Houses, businesses, from Illinois to Tennessee. For a while afterward we were one country. It did not last, and I am not going to pretend it did. But it happened, and I saw it out the windshield all the way home.
Something else happened that day that had nothing to do with New York. Sherry’s mother died. Sherry is my brother Bobby’s wife, and she has been part of this firm for a long time. Her family lost someone on September 11 the way families lose people every day, quietly, at home, with the television on in the next room showing the rest of it. The country was grieving, and so was she, and the two had nothing to do with each other. Life kept going that day for everybody, the good and the bad of it.
Twenty five years. My children have never known an airport that was not like this. Take the belt off, unpack the bag, arms above your head, get scanned. To them it is just normal. Some of us remember the country before, and what changed that morning was not only the skyline. It is when freedom became less free.
For those of us who were there, it is not the past. It is a Tuesday morning we can still see.
Keep the faith. God bless America.
Jeff