Remembering What We Lost

Today is Rosh Hashanah, the Day of Remembrance on the Jewish calendar. Fittingly, I have been in remembrance mode the past few days. There are three important anniversaries this week, and their combined effect has been to make me a little more reflective than usual. As such, this may be one of my more transparent posts. I generally tend to ignore emotions, but I believe that honest reflection reveals something fundamental about human nature—God created mankind to feel certain truths that cannot be thought or spoken. Of course, that means writing about them is inherently insufficient—how do you explain something in text that cannot be thought or spoken?—yet I hope that such an ill-fated attempt may benefit others in some small measure.

The first anniversary was Tuesday. It would have been my little brother’s 42nd birthday, and it marks a year since the last time I texted him. It seemed like such a routine communication at the time—the obligatory “Happy birthday!” that everyone sends to their family members. Maybe I would have said something more profound if I had known it would be the last thing he would ever hear from me. Or perhaps that’s wishful thinking, and I would not have been able to find the words. There seems to be great pressure in such moments, but there should not be. We think of our last words as something the dying will repeat in their minds throughout eternity, but they only hear them for a moment. Our words ultimately remain with us. We rehearse them ad nauseum, but those who meet the Lord before us have moved on to bigger and better things, leaving our meager words behind with the cares of this world.

Such is the case with life. Its brevity and tragedies are carried not by the fallen, but by those who survive them. Of course, we also get to experience life’s joys and the fond memories of those who finish their races before us. And we have the privilege of continuing to make the world a better and brighter place, passing our torches to future generations even as the flames of our families and friends are extinguished along the way. That leads to the second anniversary.

Yesterday marked a year since the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk. I wrote my initial thoughts about his assassination a year ago, but it has been interesting to see how the world has changed in the wake of his death. It would be premature to say whether our country has become more united or divided, or to evaluate the long-term political implications of his life and passing. However, it may be that his lasting impact is neither cultural nor political, but spiritual. His death was the catalyst for many in Gen Z to turn to Christ. While changing the outcome of an election is a major accomplishment, and redirecting a nation’s cultural trajectory is huge, transforming eternity for so many young people is infinitely greater—abundant fruit from a life well lived.

And today marks 25 years since terrorists attacked the United States of America on September 11, 2001. I have written about it before, too, and usually stop class early to talk about its significance with my students. We said, “We will never forget,” but many Americans have. This is the day the world changed forever, and I do not believe you can understand the world today without understanding 9/11.

Like most Americans my age, 9/11 is not just a historic event, it is something we experienced firsthand. Our world was already changing rapidly, but 9/11 was the pivotal moment that exchanged our innocence for adulthood—a world that no one wanted, for which no one was prepared, and from which there has been no escape. Our world literally changed in a moment, has never returned to normal, and never will. We have become so far removed from that life that it seems unimaginable now, and I cannot even explain it to young people anymore.

I am part of the micro-generation called Xennials. We were too young (and definitely not cool enough) for Gen X, but too old (and definitely too cool) to be Millennials. We had an analog childhood and a digital adolescence. We grew up as natives to two irreconcilable worlds. In some ways, we are like the elderly, who marvel at the world around them, but remain intricately connected to a world which they remember and for which they long, but which no longer exists. We, too, find ourselves nostalgic for a world that unexpectedly disappeared, one which never allowed us a chance to say goodbye.

We have many of the same childhood memories as the Boomers and Gen X, but also those of Millennials and Gen Z. While it is in many ways the best of both worlds, it also feels as if we belong to neither. We played outside and played Oregon Trail, we drank from the hose and downloaded from Napster, and we learned cursive and keyboarding. We could sync our bladders with commercial breaks, understood why they were called “floppy” disks, and knew the difference between a mixtape and a demo. We watched Alf and Boy Meets World, the fall of the USSR, the attack on the Oklahoma City federal building, the world mourning the tragic loss of Princess Diana, and the miscarriage of justice in the acquittals of OJ Simpson and Bill Clinton. We saw the Cold War end, the economy roar, and the government work together.

We partied like it was 1999 because it was 1999, we  survived Y2K, and we truly loved one another. I don’t just mean that we got along. We were much more united—one nation. We focused on the things we had in common instead of the things that could divide us, and we were our brothers’ keepers. We had a shared humanity, and we belonged to one another. Perhaps that, more than anything else, is what we lost. 

In my own life, 2001 was an eventful year. I successfully auditioned for the Marine Corps bands on January 2nd, and life was going well. The same day brought the end of an important relationship that I thought would last forever. I was only two days into the year, and things were already changing rapidly. I enlisted in the Marine Corps near the end of January with an assigned boot camp date of September 25th, 2001. The next few months were a blur of school, work, extracurricular activities, and questionable decisions. It was the end of my senior year, and the last few months I had to spend with my friends, many of whom I had known since kindergarten.

In May, I came home from an out-of-town prom and my house had burned down. Most of my childhood memories were stored in the attic, and they went up in flames. My family and I moved into a hotel for about a month, and then into an apartment. It was a season of closures—my relationship had ended, my time at home had ended, and when I graduated in June, my time in school also ended.

After graduation, I resumed my summer job surveying land in the days and working in a local grocery store. In August, my father had a truck-driving accident involving a fatality and lost his job. He was also facing multiple years in prison. And of course, there were all the family problems that we all deal with from time to time. I knew then that I had a choice to make. On one hand, I had a family who needed me. They had lost their home, their income, and were on the brink of losing my father. On the other, if I didn’t leave now, I would be like the millions of other people who spent the rest of their lives explaining why the “almost” made the decisions they should have.

I resigned from the grocery store a couple of weeks before I was to leave for boot camp. On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I was surveying in some woods near the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. At one point, my coworker remarked on how quiet it had been since we were so near the airport. Mid-morning, we emerged from the woods into a backyard and encountered a woman sobbing. There were no smart phones at that time, and most people did not have cell phones, so she asked if we knew what had happened. When we said no, she showed us on her television that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, and that it seemed intentional.

We called the office, and that was the end of work for the day. Sadly, I remember not caring very much at the time, because I didn’t know anyone in New York City. I was excited that the cops were all guarding the important places and I could drive as fast as I wanted. My apathy in the moment remains one of my biggest regrets in life. In the days that followed, we learned about the terrorists, their motives, the death toll, and the stories of those who had perished. Twenty-five years later, I am still haunted by the images of people who jumped because a sudden impact seemed a more bearable death than being burned alive.

I took my little brother to the End-of-Summer Weenie Roast that weekend. The planes had just resumed flying, but most Americans had not. Musicians drove to Charlotte from across the country to help people have their first normal experience after the attack. It was actually a really good show, and I remember Three Doors Down playing “If I Could Be Like That” as a tribute to the American military, whose job had just become eradicating terrorism from the face of the earth. While the concert was supposed to be my last chance to just be a normal kid, I could not erase my understanding that the terrorists had forced us into a fight, that it was my generation’s responsibility, and that we were on our way to a long war, from which many of us would never return, and from which the rest of us would carry memories for the rest of our lives.

A week and a half later, I said goodbye to my family and went to the Marine Corps. Everything was different—the airport, the bus ride, and our arrival on Parris Island. We were the first training battalion to arrive after the attacks, and more than half of my platoon was from New York. They had seen the carnage with their own eyes, and they didn’t watch strangers die, but lost family and friends in the attacks. For them, this fight was personal, and as fellow Americans, it was our sacred honor to fight alongside them.

I graduated on Friday, December 21, 2001. We were at war with Afghanistan by then, and other wars were on the horizon. My family had moved back into our house, but I got to stay in the computer room, the space that was my bedroom when I left for prom. The world was different. I enjoyed time with family and friends that weekend, and had to go to court on Monday, Christmas Eve, to find out if my father was going to prison for Christmas. He was acquitted, and 2001 ended much differently than it began.

In January 2002, I resumed training. I met my wife in February, moved to California in August, and life kept racing forward. By the time I returned home in July 2009, I was married with two children, and had been to war. Since then, I have continued going where the Lord leads me in life, and it has truly been far greater than anything I could have imagined back then. However, I still haven’t forgotten that world.

In 2019, things briefly felt like they might move back toward normal. The wars were winding down, the economy was doing well, and people were generally starting to get along with each other again. I was optimistic, and likely too much so. After the pandemic and riots, I have lost hope of ever seeing that world again. For me, September 11, 2001, remains the date when the world changed forever. There were things we lost that day that we will probably never have again.

I said earlier that life’s brevity, tragedies, joy, and fond memories are all carried by the survivors, and that our words do little for the departed after they are gone. How then should we process all we have lost? My brother’s time has ended, Charlie Kirk’s time has ended, the pre-9/11 world has ended, and one day your time and my time will end, too. We cannot stop that from happening, nor should we try. What we should do is make our limited time count in the lives of others. That is probably the greatest single indicator of a person’s impact in the lives of others—how much people miss them when they are gone.

We may never again see the world we left behind on September 10, 2001, and that’s okay. Those who cannot remember it do not understand what they’re missing, so it does not hurt them. What we can do is keep the flame of the best parts of that world burning, and pass its torch to those who will follow us when we return to our Maker and are laid to rest. We can invest our time and energy into others instead of ourselves. We can spend less time worrying about problems around the world and spend more time enjoying the company of those with whom God has surrounded us. We can love others the way we all loved each other back then. I believe that if we truly love each other, people will miss us when we’re gone. So I challenge you today, twenty-five years after we lost the world that so many of us miss so much, to be a person worth missing and to live a life worth remembering. God bless you, and God bless America!