It’s hard to believe that we’ve just passed the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I suppose the reason I’m writing this is because I regret never asking my grandparents what they saw, felt, and lived through during the big events of their time. I don’t want to leave that same silence behind. Maybe one day you—or your children—will read this and want to know what I witnessed on that day.
On Sunday, September 10th, 2001, I had just returned from a conference in Indianapolis. The next morning, I was scheduled to meet a client, Chuck Cahn, on Long Beach Island. Chuck was a successful businessman in Cherry Hill and also the mayor of that town at the time. I left home around 8:15 a.m.
As I merged onto the turnpike in Willow Grove, a newsflash interrupted the radio: “A small, single-engine plane appears to have hit one of the Twin Towers in New York.” I remember thinking what a terrible mistake that must have been—maybe a pilot had suffered a medical emergency. It was about 8:50 a.m.
Not long after, as I exited the New Jersey Turnpike, the tone of the news changed. A second plane had struck. By then, it was obvious this was no accident. Just past McGuire Air Force Base, Chris called me and said, “Turn around and come home. This isn’t a small plane—it’s two commercial airliners. Something big is happening.”
I tried to reach Chuck, but the phone lines were already jammed. I decided to continue to the island, thinking he might already be there. As I drove down Route 72, fighter jets screamed overhead one after another. The sight and sound of them, streaking low and fast toward the coast, was unlike anything I’d ever seen.
When I reached Harvey Cedars, where the Cahns’ home was being built, the place was empty. I climbed up to the unfinished roof deck, which had a wide view of the horizon. Looking north toward New York, I saw it: a great plume of smoke rising into a clear, windless sky. Even from 145 miles away, it was visible, climbing what must have been ten thousand feet before dispersing. It felt impossible that something so devastating, so far away, could be so clearly seen.
I waited past our meeting time, still unable to place a call, and then drove to the Harvey Cedars firehouse. One of our employees, Nick, was also the fire chief there. Inside, he and several firefighters were glued to the television, watching the unimaginable unfold in real time. Outside, others were loading equipment onto a truck. I asked Nick what was happening. He said simply, “We’re heading to Manhattan. They need help with recovery.”
I drove home soon after. The roads were eerily empty. Cell phones were useless—lines were either down or overwhelmed. All I had was the radio, which I clung to the whole way back and in the days that followed.
A day or two later, I learned that firefighters were told to wait until they were called. They would assemble at Giants Stadium and then be transported into the city. They believed they were going for recovery work.
About a week later, I spoke with two of our other employees, Larry and Doug, both firefighters in Pennsylvania. Larry told me, with a heaviness in his voice, “There was no recovery.” He described streets in Lower Manhattan covered knee-deep in a fine, talcum-like powder. Buildings, furniture, people—everything had been pulverized into dust. His face, and Doug’s too, told me how deeply it marked them. It was a weight they carried long after that day.
What stays with me now, all these years later, isn’t only the shock of the day itself. It’s the silence of the skies after, the way time seemed to stand still, the look on the faces of those who had gone into the city and come back changed. It was a day when the world shifted.
If you’re reading this years from now, I hope you’ll take the time to ask the people in your life what they lived through—what they saw, what they felt. These stories matter. They carry the weight of history, but also the reminder that we endure, that even in loss we search for one another, and that memory is a way of honoring both.
