24 years have passed, but often it feels like no time has passed at all. As a kid, I felt the world around me crumbling, but I just couldn’t understand what it meant or how it would impact my life. I felt the loss every day growing up in both the big moments and small. Having family dinners every night with one newly empty seat – I felt that. Going to my friends houses for sleepovers and meeting both of their parents – I felt that. Attending family gatherings knowing we were missing someone so important – I felt that.
It all felt so personal to me. Yet, more often than not, I got questions from new faces and strangers asking about my experience. My doctors, my teachers, and new people I met all over asked me about losing my father.
“Wow. How old were you?”
“I can’t imagine what that must have been like for your family.”
“I knew someone that worked there, but luckily he wasn’t at work that day.”
“You must have been too young to remember anything.”
For years, the questions and the comments bothered me. I would always leave these conversations perplexed – why did anyone think it was okay to ask me about something so personal, so tragic? Why is everyone so interested in my father’s passing, and so comfortable talking to me about it? 24 years later I still get many of the same questions.
But it wasn’t until recently that it clicked. It wasn’t about me. Thousands of New Jerseyans across this state lost someone – their neighbor’s husband never came back home; their brother that worked in the North Tower never even had the chance to call his wife to say he wasn’t going to make it; or they knew a firefighter that went into the building as a hero, and never came out.
People weren’t just asking me to learn about my experience, but to share theirs. We all went through this tragedy together. As personal as it was for me, it wasn’t just mine. Thousands of people across this state felt the impact and the heartache. My life was changed forever, and so was theirs.
We ask people about their lives sometimes not just to learn about theirs, but to connect with our own. In times of tragedy we look for comfort in others and in our community. We long for togetherness and connection to make the really really bad in life feel not so alone.
I’m so fortunate that people have asked me about my father and to share my experience with 9/11. Every time I get asked a question about that day, I get to live on in his memory. I get to share everything he brought into this world – his kindness, his generosity, his sense of humor, and how much love he gave and how much he was loved. He only had 37 years to experience his life, and I have the rest of mine to share it.
I hope when we reflect on 9/11 and tragic events like that day, we also take it as an opportunity to realize we need each other. We need each other to celebrate our wins and our victories, and we really need each other to mourn our tragedies. 24 years later, and I hope we all reach out to someone today, impacted by this tragedy or another, and let them know – they are not alone. They are never alone. We are in this life, through the good and bad, together.
Theresa Furmato Velardi’s father, Paul James Furmato, was a trader and a vice president at Cantor Fitzgerald in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
