People Are Opening Up About What Was The Worst Moment For Them On 9/11, And The Mark It Left
This year marked the 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. While I think all of us old enough to remember that day will agree that it doesn't feel like yesterday, the memories of that day and the emotions we felt feel as vivid as ever.
Recently, Reddit user MooglePomCollector was curious about people's recollections of that day when they asked: "Those alive during 9/11, what was the worst moment on that day?"
The thread got over 16K replies, with people sharing both first and secondhand accounts of what was the worst thing they remember about that day. Below are some of the comments that really stood out to Redditors:
1."The hours before I knew if my mom was dead or alive. They wouldn’t let us leave the school, and I didn’t have a phone. From our school, we could look out the window and see the smoke. Some people even saw the second plane hit. Finally, they couldn’t hold us any longer, and I ran home. My mom was asleep and didn’t even know what had happened; she had taken me to school and then decided she would take the day off and went home to nap and just slept all day."
2."An acquaintance of mine was a medical resident on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The hospitals went into emergency triage mode, prepping for an onslaught of injuried survivors, thinking there would be huge overflow from closer hospitals. Then it was just…silent. There were no survivors to send their way. That’s when she realized the unprecedented devastation of the attack."
3."When the second plane hit, and it became evident that this was not an accident."
4."I was in seventh grade in Brooklyn. Mom worked right around the corner from the WTC. When school let out, a friend's mom took me to their house until we could get in contact with my mom. When she picked me up at 6 p.m. at my friend's house, it was one of the most significant moments in my life because she was alive and here."
5."Both my dad and sister were flying that day, and I didn’t know when exactly. I lived in D.C., and the phones were all down, so I couldn’t check. It was stressful. Definitely so much worse for so many people."
6."I was a child, so the whole thing didn’t really sink in until later. My dad was on a plane out of Jersey at that exact moment, so of course my mom was freaking out. We didn’t own a TV, so we went to Circuit City to get one so she could watch the news and find out if he was okay. It wasn’t until I saw my mom absolutely lose her shit on an employee trying to upsell her a TV that it really clicked for me how serious everything was."
7."All the footage of people jumping."
"I had trouble sleeping without thinking of that for weeks. I still can't dwell on it for long without getting unnerved. The idea of having to choose between burning to death or jumping to your death is just unfathomable."
8."My dad was a bartender in Fairfield County, Connecticut, near a train station, and he said the cars left there in the parking lot were sad. Then some of his regulars stopped showing up, and eventually, he found out they were gone."
9."For me, the worst was thinking I had just lost both my parents in a six-month period — my mom died in the spring of 2001. While my dad was at the Pentagon that day. I was a sophomore in high school and spent the day wondering who I was going to be living with, how I was going to keep our house, how I was going to pay for food, etc. All punctuated by new and increasingly horrific images and news updates. I barely remember that day other than sitting with my classmates in each subsequent period, staring at the TV, and talking in small groups."
"A lot of people at the school had family that lived or worked in D.C. so we were all more than a little freaked out. Most of that day is a foggy haze to me. My brain was just overwhelmed with the enormity of it all and my own personal shock.
My dad was fine in the end, but I didn't know until I got home from school, and checked the answering machine and heard his voice. I think I cried a little with relief."
10."A phone call from the mother of my lifelong best friend telling me that he had been killed at the Pentagon that day."
11."When the first tower fell, I felt absolute dread and horror, knowing how many lives were ending at that moment. The second one falling just felt like the end of the world, and in many ways, it was. The world we lived in changed dramatically and immediately."
12."The smell was horrifying. Smells have a profound visceral effect on you, some kind of deep evolutionary thing, maybe, and this was just awful."
"I can't forget it. This is the thing that people outside New York don't realize. The smell was awful. And it was literally everywhere. You couldn't escape it. Home, work, everywhere. It lasted for months. The rest of the world could shut off the TV and forget about it for a while if they wanted. But in NY, it was impossible."
13."I was living in the East Village at the time in one of NYU’s dorms. I remember how quiet the streets were. Everything below 14th St. was closed off. Early in the morning on 9/12, like, around 5 a.m., I looked out the window down at the street and saw that a homeless man had died during the night. I called 911, and it took officers an hour to show up. But, I guess there was too much going on because that poor man lay there on the sidewalk with a sheet covering him for over 12 hours. Of all the things I experienced on that day and in the days following, this stuck with me the most."
14."For me, it was that I had just gotten home from Army training late on September 9, and was really looking forward to relaxing with my girlfriend for the two days I had before classes started at university. I hadn't even unpacked my gear yet. I turned the TV on and watched the second plane hit, and my heart sank when my phone rang soon after. By the end of the day, I was saying goodbye to my friends and family again."
15."I was living in Okinawa when it happened, and immediately, the base shut down, and the sirens went crazy. They had prepared us for attacks from North Korea and that's how we treated that day. It was in the middle of the night, and I was like 11, so it was super weird."
16."My high school was on the flight path for an Air Force Base. Hearing the entire squadron of fighter jets take off in quick succession in a way that they had NEVER DONE BEFORE and not knowing why was absolutely unnerving."
17."When I found out that my roommate's dad died in the second tower. He had gone down to the sky deck after the first plane hit, however, they gave the all clear, so he went back up to his office, thinking he would be okay because he was there in 1993 during the car bomb attack in the garage. Then the second plane hit, trapping him."
18."My father was an airline pilot for United Airlines, and he flew transcontinental from NYC/Boston on a regular basis. I was away at college and had no idea where he was until the afternoon. He ended up being in Denver for almost a week, but he knew quite a few of the crew members who died that day. He keeps a plaque with all of their names in his office."
19.And lastly, "My cousin literally ran the 10 miles from Julliard, where he was attending school, to his mom's apartment in Brooklyn because she worked in the Towers. When he found out she was alive, hungover, and in the shower, he literally crawled into the shower with her and burst into tears. :("
You can read more stories over on the original thread on Reddit.
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
