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9/11 Lessons: We Rise Again

As we take time to remember those we lost on Sept. 11, 2001, let’s also remember what we’ve held onto.

Mood music:

As the years have passed, I’ve found myself comparing the terrorist attacks to the personal demons we all deal with at various points in our lives.

Many of us have fears, regrets, dreams and nightmares. Like terrorists who threaten to blow up buildings and people, our personal demons threaten to destroy us. But as I’ve learned from my own experiences, we don’t have to let the evil win.

One thing that has inspired me since 9/11 is the way New Yorkers have gone on with their lives. I’ve been to Lower Manhattan many times and seen people doing so even as they walk past what we used to call Ground Zero. The first time I saw that I was angry, because people seemed to be passing hallowed ground without a care in the world. I’ve since come to see it as a sign of strength.

Terrorists can destroy buildings and take lives. But they can’t keep us down for long.

The WTC site now includes a museum commemorating that terrible day, as well as a memorial built around the footprints of the Twin Towers. There’s also 1 WTC, which is now the tallest building in America. I’ve seen it at various stages of construction.

Bill Brenner at 1 World Trade Center

I see it as a symbol of how we manage to face our adversity and rise up.

For years after 9/11, I was terrified of flying. I eventually got back on planes, and today I love to fly. A couple years ago, I even took a flight on 9/11.

I rose.

Before my current job, I worked for Akamai, a company co-founded by Danny Lewin, who died that day aboard American Airlines Flight 11, the plane that struck the North Tower of the WTC. The company was struggling at the time of his death, caught up in the dot-com bust of the early 2000s. He always said the company would make it because its people are “tenacious as hell.”

He was right. His company ultimately rose from the depths and is a powerhouse today. Many entities and individuals have risen in similar fashion.

We rise after awful events like 9/11. We rise after sickness, loss and the mental-physical maladies that threaten to ruin us. Not everyone makes it. But enough do to fill me with a hope that will never dim.

Take time to remember the dead today. Watch some of the 9/11 documentaries on YouTube, because they’ll remind you that people who didn’t make it that day conducted themselves with honor and saved others.

Then rise up and carry on.

one world trade center aerial shot

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Life in a Place of Death

As regular readers know by now, I’ve been taking a class on how to keep my attention on the present. Saturday was an all-morning session that included a silent, hour-long walk through Oak Hill Cemetery in Newburyport, Mass. A lot of us tend to see cemeteries as a place of death. But I found a lot of life there, instead.

Mood music:

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This wasn’t a new experience for me. There are three cemeteries within walking distance of my house, and I’ve walked through all of them. I tend to look at the date of death and consider the myriad ways the person passed. If it’s 1918, for example, I find myself wondering if he or she died in the Spanish Flu pandemic. If a veteran died in the vicinity of early June 1944, I ponder the likelihood that this person died in the carnage of D-Day during WW II.

In Oak Hill Cemetery, I was stopped in my tracks by a gravestone with the death date of Sept. 11, 2001. I looked up the name, Thomas Pecorelli, and learned that he was on American Airlines Flight 11, which terrorists flew into the north tower of the World Trade Center. He was 30 when he died and was carrying the ultrasound image of his unborn child, headed home to his wife.

He lived a hell of a life. He was a cameraman with Fox Sports and E! Entertainment Television, the obituaries said.

Thieves stole his original gravestone, but a new one is in its place, complete with two benches and a garden with bird feeders.

There’s a lot of life to be found in these graveyards. But you might miss it if you jog through. You have to walk through slowly and silently.

If you have a mind that sometimes gets stuck on one obsessive thought or often drifts when someone is talking to you, the occasional cemetery stroll is worth working into your life.

Few things will get you out of your own head like a study of other people’s lives.

Now that I’ve learned something about giving my present attention to the dead, I’m eager for the next step: learning to give present awareness to the living.

Pecorelli Tombstone