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For the children who weren’t yet born when their fathers died in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — more than 100, according to Tuesday’s Children, an organization that counsels them — their fathers exist only as a lifelong, heartbreaking absence.
On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, here are four stories of children who entered the world after their fathers had already left.
The first time she remembers having to make a Father’s Day card at school, Robin Ornedo was in first grade.
As a teacher explained the assignment — folding construction paper to resemble a man’s shirt and tie — the 6-year-old felt a sadness creeping in. She knew her dad was gone, lost in what she only vaguely understood as some sort of accident.
For a moment, Robin sat wondering what to do. Then she remembered something her mom always told her: that it was okay to talk to her dad as if he was still there with them. That in a way, he was still there.
She grabbed a piece of purple paper for the shirt and turquoise for the tie. On the inside, she was supposed to fill in details about him. She thought of things other people had told her, and an older student helped her write them down: “Funny and fun” and “You are like me.”
“I pretended my dad was alive,” Robin recalled recently, “just so I wouldn’t feel left out.”
It was something she would do again and again. At her family’s home in Corona, Calif., Robin’s creations — a tile with her small handprint, paper planes scrawled with “XOXOXO” and “I love you” — sit in what she refers to as “Dad’s room.”
On the walls, photos show Ruben Ornedo wearing the smile everyone says his daughter shares. A display case holds a folded American flag, memorabilia from years’ worth of commemorative ceremonies and a palm-sized model of the Pentagon. Propped up on one shelf, below the flag, is the seating chart for American Airlines Flight 77.
Robin can’t remember when she grasped what it all meant; she thinks it might have been fourth or fifth grade. As she starts her sophomore year at the University of California at Irvine, where she is studying biological sciences, she still feels confused when she thinks about what happened to her dad, and why. A 39-year-old engineer at Boeing, he was killed when terrorists hijacked the plane he was on and crashed it into the Pentagon. His daughter calls it “the incident” or “the event.”
As she’s grown older, her mom, Sheila, has told her more details about their loss. How she struggled that first trimester of pregnancy and how Ruben, wanting to be at her side, interrupted his business trip in D.C. to fly home on Sept. 11 instead of Sept. 17. How she sobbed watching the news that day.
“I can’t imagine what she went through,” Robin said. “No matter how many times I hear her tell me that story, it’s just — I will never understand how she feels.”
She was the first and only child for the couple, who were married just that year. In the happy months after they found out about the pregnancy, Ruben liked to rest his head against Sheila’s stomach and listen. They knew they were having a girl but hadn’t decided on a name; Ashley was an early favorite. After his death, Sheila chose Robin because it sounded like Ruben. She didn’t know how she’d deliver their baby without him.
Somehow, she got through it. Robin Galero Ornedo arrived on Jan. 31, 2002, welcomed by relatives of both parents and by multiple godparents — so many of Ruben’s friends and co-workers asked, and Sheila didn’t want to tell anyone no. Robin’s photo hung outside her dad’s old office, where one Boeing employee told a company publication she was “everybody’s baby.”
Surrounded by that circle, Robin grew up hearing stories about her namesake. She knows that he was quiet but decisive, confident enough to ask her mother, when they were introduced, “So, when are we going on a date?” She knows that before he proposed, he had a friend teach him Tagalog so he could ask her to marry him in her native language. And she knows he wasn’t a fan of the water but loved climbing mountains.
Which Robin finds funny because she spent years on the swim team, and she’s a little afraid of heights.
Other details she’s gleaned from dozens of letters and cards her mom tucked into a binder with an American flag on the cover. They arrived in the weeks after 9/11, addressed to Sheila and “Baby Ornedo.” Robin reaches for the binder when she feels alone.
In her admission essay for the University of California system, she described realizing she “was never going to have a dad there for me to protect me, to dance with me, or to carry me on their shoulders.” But the letters, with their stories about “Ornedo the Tornado,” helped change the way she thought about his absence.
“I learned to see my dad as a role model instead of some stranger I will never meet in this lifetime,” she wrote. “My name is Robin for a reason. It is to be like my father, Ruben, who always reached the top of the mountains.”
Robin wanted to attend UCLA, where her dad studied engineering. Maybe she would feel closer to him strolling the same hallways he had. When she was waitlisted, she was devastated: “I thought I lost that connection with him.”
The sting of the UCLA rejection feels distant now. There are other ways, Robin has decided, to be like her dad.
Luke Taylor always knew he had a mother and father in heaven, though as a child he didn’t really know what that meant.
Then one night when he was 8 or 9 years old, he wandered into the office of the man he called Dad. As the two watched TV together, Luke asked for the first time about the memorabilia on the shelves. There were dog tags, a folded American flag and a photograph of his grandfather commissioning two sons — Dean and Kip Taylor — into the Army.
Then came the long conversation that Luke would remember for years to come. Dean Taylor tried break it down on a third-grade level. He explained that Kip Taylor, Luke’s biological father and Dean’s brother, was killed in the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon before Luke was even born.
That Nancy Taylor, Luke’s biological mother, died of breast cancer just over two years later. And that he and his wife, Donna, had agreed to Nancy’s wish that they raise Luke and his older brother as their own.
“I think I remember it most because he started crying, and my dad does not cry very often,” Luke said. “Like, I can count on one hand how many times my dad has cried throughout my last 19 years of life.”
The sight of it made him cry, too.
Luke was born Oct. 25, 2001, six weeks after American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, killing all 64 people aboard the plane and 125 inside the building. Lt. Col. Kip Taylor, a 38-year-old aide to the Army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel, was among the dead.
Just over an hour before the attack, Kip had sent friends and family an email rhapsodizing about how fatherhood had changed his life. He and Nancy saw their 20-month-old son and the one on the way, both conceived through IVF, as miracles.
“After kids, there are days that just get going when you say, ‘Hi honey, I’m home,’” he wrote. “My conclusion is that what we do until that moment pales in comparison to what we do after that point in the day.”
Twenty years later, the message brings a sense of peace to the son he never met. It shows that his father was happy at the end, Luke says: “You do all this planning in life — hey, I want kids, I want a good job, I want to settle down with a good wife and be a dad. … He’s like, ‘I’m finally here.’”
Every once in a while, Luke goes through a “sad spurt” thinking of all he’s lost. On those days, he says, he misses Kip and Nancy, “which is weird, because I didn’t know them.”
But most of the time, he’s matter-of-fact in talking about their deaths. He tries to stay upbeat. He feels lucky to have been raised from 2 years old by the only parents he can remember, who describe Luke and his brother as “the greatest gift ever.”
Married for almost 20 years on Sept. 11, 2001, Dean and Donna never planned to have children. After Nancy’s death, they rededicated their lives to the two little boys. Dean retired from the Army, getting a job at the Transportation Security Administration, and Donna became a stay-at-home mom. They hewed to a written list of requests Nancy left behind.
Luke, who marvels at the sacrifices Dean and Donna made, believes they were “meant to be parents.”
There’s no way of knowing how his life would have turned out if the attacks didn’t happen, he said.
“I don’t really do the whole ‘what if’ thing,” Luke said. “I mean, you can go back in history and it’s like, if this hadn’t happened, the world would be a completely different place. Yeah, that’s true. But it did happen, so here we are.”
He grew up in Colorado Springs among reminders of his “parents in heaven.” Sometimes he would make a face or the light would hit a certain way, and someone would tell him he looked just like Kip. He played basketball in high school like Kip, and after a good game, Dean would say how proud he’d have been.
Sometimes the family would visit Arlington National Cemetery, where Kip and Nancy are buried, and Luke would feel a swell of pride knowing the Taylor name was among all the white headstones.
At Texas Christian University, Luke is in the Reserve Officer Training Corps, carrying on the family military tradition. One of the other cadets is the son of a long-ago friend of Kip’s.
“Every time I put on the Army uniform as a cadet, I feel connected to him because that’s what he wore,” Luke said.
There’s one more thing that might strengthen their connection: a time capsule. For years, the plastic container has been waiting in storage, taped shut and tucked away until he turns 21.
Nancy put it together before her death at 39; Luke has been told letters and audio recordings are inside.
Sometimes his lost parents can feel almost like distant relatives. He’s hoping the time capsule brings them into sharper focus.
“It’s like I’m missing something,” he said, “but I don’t know what I’m missing.”
Before her family dug the camcorder and cassette tapes out of storage, Claudia Szurkowski had only seen her dad in photographs.
She watched eagerly last winter as one of the late-1990s home videos filled the living room television screen. Finally, she would get a glimpse of him in action — the man she’d heard about all her life.
But when Norbert P. Szurkowski made his first appearance, his daughter almost missed it. He was speaking off-camera, his voice deep, confident and painfully unfamiliar.
“It took my mom to point it out that it was him,” she said. “And that really upset me, because if I were to hear him down the street, I wouldn’t know it’s him.”
Months later, the memory still gnaws at Claudia. She mourns her father every day, and yet there is so much she will never know about him.
She was born on May 3, 2002, nearly eight months after the day he left for work and didn’t come home.
Her parents had been aware of the pregnancy for only a few days: her mother, Ursula, woke up one morning and just knew. Norbert was giddy. It was baby No. 2 for the couple, who had been together since they were teenagers newly arrived to the United States from Poland. Their oldest, Alexandra, was 3 years old.
Claudia learned her family’s Sept. 11 story in bits and pieces. She knows it is difficult for her mom to relive — even now, 20 years later, after she has remarried, had a third daughter and moved her children to Naples, Fla.
While training to become a mechanic, her dad was earning extra money putting up wallpaper. That Tuesday morning, a supervisor sent him to the World Trade Center to fix a mistake another worker had made at the Cantor Fitzgerald offices.
The last Ursula heard, her outgoing, adventurous husband of five years was on the 104th floor, several stories above where American Airlines Flight 11 tore into the North Tower.
“He wasn’t supposed to be there,” Claudia said, shaking her head. Thinking about it made her mad.
She grew up longing for the father she’d never met. She saw him in her own features and grew accustomed to people telling her, after she made some expression or gesture, “Your dad used to do that, too!” She found comfort in knowing he loved the name Claudia.
“Whenever I get thinking about him, and I miss him so much,” she said, “I just realize, oh, he knew what my name was going to be — like, he knew me, in a way.”
Sometimes Claudia envies her big sister, who at least got a few years with him. In one of the home videos, he held her and talked to her: “Alexandra, Alexandra, hey, darling.” Then again, she thinks, maybe that just makes it harder.
Every year on Sept. 11, she posts a tribute to her dad on social media. “I miss you more than anyone could ever understand,” she wrote on Instagram in 2018, below a picture of his name inscribed in bronze at the 9/11 memorial in New York.
Otherwise she mostly keeps her loss to herself. She doesn’t want people treating her differently out of pity. It had happened before; someone would discover her dad died in the World Trade Center and suddenly want to sit next to her at lunch.
“My junior year of high school, when somebody found out, they instantly went on their phone and posted a photo of me,” Claudia recalled. “And they were like, this girl is so strong, blah, blah, blah, things like that. And I’ve never once had a full conversation with them.”
So she mourns more quietly. She reads as much as she can about 9/11, feeling less lonely when she learns about other people who lost someone that day.
Her dad smiles out from a photograph she keeps in her bedroom, next to a cheerleading trophy and her diploma from Naples High School. She talks to the image of him every day before she goes to sleep, sometimes out loud, sometimes in her head.
She tells him the kinds of things she’d tell him if he were at the dinner table. How her day went at her job as a secretary at a Naples hospital or in her classes at Florida SouthWestern State College, where she’s studying law. What she has planned for the next day.
“I’ll ask him questions, even though I know I’m not going to get an answer,” Claudia said. “Like, what does he think? Is he proud?”
She wonders what her life would be like if he were here. She’s always picturing his presence in her head. Just the ordinary things: Getting in trouble with her mom and asking her dad to get her out of it. Or being told, “Go ask your father.”
As Jack Esse was growing up, the older he got the more he behaved like a man he’d never met.
He would twist his tongue when telling a joke. He curled his hands when walking. And he announced two very specific demands when it came to food. One: He would never again eat mayonnaise again. Two: Different foods on his plate should never ever touch.
These things freaked out his mother because Jack was turning into a replica of his father, Jim Patrick, a bond broker on the 105th floor of the North Tower at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
On that day, Jack was still percolating in his mother’s bulging belly. He was born seven weeks later on Halloween, and he has lived his life in the costume of a man for whom he has no memories.
“I obviously never knew him,” Jack said, “but I have a lot of him in me.”
Which is precisely where Jack’s mother, Terilyn, always explained he’d be.
When Jack was a toddler, he and his mother talked about where Daddy Jim lived. They have an old VHS tape of one of those conversations.
“Who does he live with now?” Terilyn asks.
“With God and the angels,” Jack says.
And in his heart.
But even with his heart full, there was also a profound absence — and a lot of questions.
There is no playbook for a son to learn that his father died in an audacious attack in which terrorists used airplanes as missiles against America’s towering symbols of capitalism and democracy.
Terilyn, who remarried a few years after her husband’s death, recalled that she read somewhere that she should answer the questions as they are posed, and offer nothing more.
Around kindergarten, when Jack asked how his daddy died, Terilyn said, “He was in a building, and it fell down.”
A year or so later he asked how the building fell. “A plane flew into it,” his mother answered.
By third grade, the questions become more pointed.
Jack wanted to know, “Why would a plane fly into a building?”
“Well, there were these really bad guys,” his mother replied. “And the bad guys were flying the plane, and they flew the plane into the building.”
As Jack advanced in school, the event that killed his father became a subject of instruction. The more Jack learned, the more resentment built up.
Still living in Fairfield, Conn., his mother had married a man who treated him like his own son and adopted him. He had a younger sister and brother, as well as three stepsiblings. And yet, his half-siblings had their own flesh-and-blood father.
“I felt like I was missing something that they had that I didn’t — a real father, real siblings, stuff like that,” Jack said. “I felt like I was missing my real dad. I had a hard time with that.”
Jack saw a therapist, but he said he got over the resentment naturally.
“I think as I matured, I saw that I had a really great life, a man I called ‘Dad’ even if he wasn’t my biological dad,” Jack said. “I came to accept it. I look at my siblings like my real siblings. This is my family.”
As he grew up, Jack revealed even more traits of the dad he never knew. He became obsessed with hockey, just like his dad. He gives everyone nicknames, just like his dad. He takes time feeling comfortable around strangers, just like his dad.
“People talk about nature versus nurture,” Terilyn said. “Well there is a lot of nature with Jack. I’m constantly saying, ‘That’s Jim.’”
Each Sept. 11, Jack and his family mark Jim’s death quietly. He visits a nearby park where there is a memorial for Connecticut victims of the attack. At dinner, they hold hands and say a prayer for him. Jack’s longing for him endures — a longing that is shaped by what is both present and missing.
“I can’t sit and wonder anymore about what my life would have been like without September 11th happening, if I had known my dad,” said Jack, now a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin, where he’s studying business. “I know how quickly things can change and what can be taken away.”
And that’s why Jack said he usually ends conversations with friends and family with a simple message he wishes he could tell the man who also despised mayonnaise: “I love you.”
Children who lost a parent that day share a burden of grief, prying questions and ubiquitous footage of the disaster that killed their parents
Robyn Higley has always hated September. It’s the month when everything bad happens, when her spirits, generally so bright and bubbly the rest of the year, grow bleak and deflated.
She feels sad in September. Though she doesn’t fully understand why.
As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, she knows that this September is going to be worse than even the 19 others she has lived through. The media will endlessly reprise that terrible day, there will be an outpouring of patriotic fervor and emoting, and she will be even more on show than in previous years.
“I do not like it all,” she said. “Yes I get it, the 20th is a big thing. But there’s so much expectation of how I’m supposed to feel. People expect this grieving little girl who’s so heartbroken. But I’m almost 20 years old, I’m grown up now.”
It’s complicated being Robyn Higley around 9/11. How should she grieve for the father whom she never met? What should she make of the label that has been pinned to her throughout her life – “9/11 baby” – when she herself was not even there on that tragic day?
On 11 September 2001 her father, Robert Higley – Robbie as he was known to all – went to work on the 92nd floor of the south tower of New York’s World Trade Center. An insurance executive, he had started a new job three months before and was excited that day to have been asked to step up as acting manager.
When the north tower was struck at 8.46am, Robbie called his wife Vycki and told her that something had happened in the other building but that he was fine. “It was an agonizingly short conversation when I look back on it now,” Vycki Higley said.
It took Vycki time to piece together what happened next. Her husband helped evacuate 12 of his colleagues, ushering them into an elevator that was one of the last to reach the ground floor before United Airlines flight 175 slammed into the south tower at 9.03am.
Robbie didn’t make it out. He chose not to get into the elevator because he wanted to “do the managerial thing”, Vycki said, and make sure everyone else was all right.
Vycki was left a widow on 9/11, a single mother caring for her four-year-old daughter Amanda. She was also heavily pregnant with Robyn.
By the time Robyn was born seven weeks later, on 3 November 2001, the “9/11 baby” was already a celebrity. Such was the level of interest in her as a newborn victim of the twin towers attacks that a camera crew from ABC News’ 20/20 was present in the delivery room at her birth.
“It was hilarious,” Robyn said. “When my mom went into labour she got to the hospital and found ABC News already waiting for her.”
Robyn Higley is one of 105 children who were in the womb when their fathers were killed in the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. As a member of this exceptionally rarified club, she entered the world and grew up in an environment in which her identity had already been set for her.
As a young child she started to understand that something monumental had happened on the day her father lost his life, but she had no idea how to process it. “I knew what 9/11 was about but I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel. Those are very complex questions for a five-year-old,” she said.
Vycki was equally blindsided by the challenge of bringing up two young girls in the wake of the booming calamity of the terrorist attacks. What was she supposed to tell them?
“Nobody gave anybody a book,” she said. “There wasn’t a twin towers manual telling us what to do, how to raise two young children who lost their father in this tragic thing.”
There were issues for Robyn with her older sister Amanda. They were best friends and extremely close but their contrasting experiences of 9/11 – Amanda aged four, Robyn yet to be born – led to tensions and rivalries.
“There’s a lot of jealousy between them,” Vycki said. “As a 9/11 baby born after her father died, Robyn got all the media attention, which annoyed Amanda. But Robyn is jealous that Amanda had four years with their father, and she had nothing.”
Every time 11 September rolled round the spotlight on Robyn would intensify. “It was awful throughout high school. People who weren’t even my friends would come up to me and be like, ‘Hey, how are you doing? Are you OK?’ And they’d say it in a way like they expected me to want the sympathy and the pity.”
At times she got the eerie feeling that people wanted her to burst into tears or have a dramatic breakdown. “They wanted me to collapse. Every time a 9/11 announcement would play at the moment the first tower fell and I would start to react, you would see all the eyes gravitate towards me.”
This year for the first time Robyn, Amanda and Vycki will attend the official 9/11 commemoration at Ground Zero. Having shunned the globally broadcast event for so long, Vycki said she had come to the view that “this just seems the year to do it”.
It’s already causing Robyn some distress. Seven weeks after the 20th anniversary she will herself turn 20, and that has got her thinking about how she is not that many years away from 29, the age her father was on 9/11.
“I’m getting closer to the age he was when he died. When I’m 30 I’m going to be doing things he never got to do, like dropping off my kid at kindergarten, which he never did with me. That is insanely baffling when you think about that,” she said.
The 105 babies of 9/11 are a subset of a much larger community of children who lost a parent in the twin towers, the Pentagon or on board United Airlines flight 93, which crashed in a field near Shanksville. All told, some 3,051 kids were bereaved – usually from the death of their father given that seven out of eight of the victims of 9/11 were male.
For the past 20 years Terry Sears has been immersing herself in the world of the children of 9/11. She is executive director of Tuesday’s Children, a non-profit set up days after the attacks on a mission to provide support and long-term healing for the kids left behind.
In the runup to the anniversary Sears has been rewatching old footage shot by the charity in the early years when they would take the children on day trips. What has struck her most is simply the scale of the loss.
“You’d have a picnic in New Jersey or a beach party on Long Island, and hundreds of kids would turn up who all lost a parent on that day. It was such concentrated loss. Looking at the footage today, it’s still overwhelming.”
Over the years Sears has come to see shared experiences between the children. One of the most potent was the ever-present nature of 9/11, the sense that you couldn’t escape its grasp no matter how hard you tried.
“It was on the news every day. Just as you started watching TV after school those images of the buildings collapsing would come back on. So for 9/11 kids, their stories were played out in public every day for years.”
Sears noted another powerful shared experience that Robyn Higley also articulated – the tyranny of other people’s expectations. “So many 9/11 kids told me that over the years they would try just to be themselves,” Sears said. “They would get a new job and would be so disappointed when someone said to them ‘I heard you lost your dad’, because they didn’t want the pity, they just wanted to be normal.”
Mike Friedman is intimately acquainted with the shadow that 9/11 has placed over its children. He and his twin brother Dan were 11 on the day they lost their father.
“9/11 is the only tragedy that is associated with a specific date, so nobody lets you forget it,” Mike said. “It’s on the news, on TV, on the internet. You never become fully immune to that – in the week up to 9/11 I’m never feeling like my normal self.”
Even before the attacks, the brothers had a special connection to the enormous World Trade Center skyscrapers in downtown Manhattan. The link stems from the most notable feature about the brothers – their height. Mike is 6ft 11in and Dan 6ft 9in.
For years they were the tallest people at their school, teachers included, and they acquired a nickname that paid homage to their stature. It was given to them by the basketball superstar Magic Johnson, who they had the chance to meet at one of their mother’s work functions; he signed an autograph for them, writing: “To the Twin Towers, best of luck”.
The nickname stuck. Mike and Dan were now the Twin Towers, well before their dad Andrew Friedman, a 44-year-old equity sales trader, went to work that day on the 92nd floor of the north tower.
There are striking differences between the experiences of the twins and Robyn Higley. Unlike her, they were very much present on the day and vividly recall being called out of class by the school principal and told a plane had hit their father’s building in New York but not to worry, he was fine.
They went about the rest of the day as though nothing had happened. They remember having fun at a neighbour’s house, swimming in the pool and enjoying a barbecue.
It was not until the following day that their mother, Lisa Friedman Clark, sat them down and told them: “Guys, I don’t think your dad’s coming home.”
But there are also affinities among the 9/11 children. Like Robyn, it took the twins many years to scratch together what had happened to their father. Lisa wanted to shield them from painful details until they were old enough to take them in.
So they grew up thinking that their father had been OK until the north tower collapsed, that he had had “plenty of air”, as Lisa told them. Dan was left with the impression that the 92nd floor had been a quiet and contemplative place until the very end.
When they were in their early 20s their mother shared with them the truth. “She told us that he had an hour and a half of hell, trapped on the floor. He was coughing a lot when she was on the phone with him. There was smoke, the walls were caving in, the stairwell was inaccessible, people were choking and jumping out of the building. That was painful to hear.”
All the 9/11 children have had struggles over the years. The Friedmans saw child therapists to help them through the grieving process.
Robyn had severe bouts of paranoia as a child. She would have separation anxiety from her mother, and would enter a movie theatre only after someone had scouted it and declared it to be safe.
“I grew up knowing that my dad walked into work one day and never walked out. That made me very scared to walk into any situation.”
Memorabilia have helped them gain a closer connection with their lost fathers. The twins have quilts that a stranger from Oregon knitted them, made out of Andrew’s college shirts and other clothes, and Dan keeps one of his dad’s golf clubs in his locker at the Long Island club where they play.
Robyn has a stuffed animal, a pink bunny, which her father bought for her when he and Vycki learned that their unborn child was going to be a girl. She has found the bunny very soothing over the years, helping her to confront one of her greatest anguishes – that her father never knew who she was.
“I struggled with that for a long time, that he doesn’t know who I am. But he knew I was a girl, I know that because he bought me stuff and that gave me a little comfort. He knew about me, who I was; he was excited about me.”
The 9/11 kids have also had shared moments of unexpected exhilaration, none stranger than the killing in May 2011 of Osama bin Laden. His death in Pakistan at the hands of US Navy Seal team six was announced while Robyn and her family were celebrating her sister Amanda’s 14th birthday. “We celebrated with a chocolate cake. It was really good,” she said.
There were even what you might call perks of being a 9/11 kid celebrity. Robyn was taken backstage at the Broadway hit musical Hairspray. “I got to stand in a giant hairspray canister – that was the coolest thing for a six-year-old.”
Every summer for a week she went to “America’s Camp”, a play setting in the countryside expressly for the children of 9/11. She came to regard it as a safe haven, a place where she didn’t have to talk about “it”, where you didn’t have to explain yourself.
As the years passed, Robyn said, her appreciation of the father she never met deepened. When she was young he was just a photograph to her; now she has fleshed out his profile into a rounded human being.
She sees him as this “crazy funny goofball who liked to make people laugh. He was just one of the greatest people ever.”
All things considered, Robyn is amazed by how well she has emerged, the 9/11 baby metamorphosed into an independent, strong woman. “I’m insanely surprised by how good I’ve turned out given how much there was against me.”
She has only two regrets. She longs for her father to be around to see her blossom. “I wish he could see just how proud I am of myself.”
The other regret relates to 9/11 itself. Just occasionally she allows herself to reflect on how Robbie sacrificed his own life to save others. “He was a hero and I love that,” she said. “But there are moments I get mad – why didn’t he get into that elevator?”
As the league kicks off its 102nd season this week, the NFL family will join together to recognize the 20th anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and honor those who have lost and sacrificed their lives over the last two decades.
Plans announced today include a continued commitment to Tuesday’s Children, which works to ensure that families who have suffered losses due to the events of 9/11, post-9/11 military service, or other acts of mass violence and terrorism always have a comforting place to turn to for support and community.
Tuesday’s Children helped the NFL to identify families to honor, including the Cayne family, which will be recognized before the NFL’s Kickoff Game in Tampa Bay on Thursday, Sept. 9 in stadium through an announcement and on-air on NBC. The Cayne family, who currently reside in Florida, lost their father on 9/11.
The NFL will provide unifying moments nationwide on air and in all stadiums just prior to the start of the nine 1 p.m. ET NFL games on Sunday, Sept. 12. Just prior to the start of those games, an NFL Media-produced tribute video will be simulcast nationwide across CBS and FOX pregame shows to highlight what the days after 9/11 meant to America. The piece, which ties in the challenges of the past two years and how Americans overcome hardships together, is narrated by award-winning actor and former FDNY firefighter Steve Buscemi.
Immediately following the tribute video, a performance of the National Anthem from the National September 11 Memorial and Museum will be performed by music therapist Juliette Candela, who was also selected by Tuesday’s Children. Candela’s father, John, lost his life on 9/11 in the World Trade Center. Juliette’s performance will honor her father and all others who lost their lives on that day.
Clubs will remember 9/11 on-field during Week 1 games in the following ways:
Select clubs will also invite a Tuesday’s Children family to their home game in Week 1 and participate alongside the league in 9/11 Day of service, which is a day of volunteering to rekindle the extraordinary spirit of togetherness and compassion that arose in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
Additionally, on Sept.10 at 9 p.m. ET, NFL Network will air an hour-long special hosted by Melissa Stark, NFL360 Remembering 9/11. The show will include features on late NFL head coach Jim Fassel and how he led the New York Giants during the 2001 season, Rich Eisen remembering 9/11, an interview with Al Michaels and Stark discussing the 2001 MNF season, and features on New York Jets head coach Robert Saleh and the FDNY vs. NYPD 9/11 tribute football game. The piece on both Saleh and the FDNY vs. NYPD 9/11 tribute game will premiere on a 9/11 themed episode of NFL Films Presents on Sept. 8 at 7:30 p.m. ET on FS1.
The NFL also has partnered with America250 on the America250 Awards, a multi-year program that honors Americans who exemplify the intangible qualities of the American spirit. The public is invited to nominate by Oct. 11 someone whose heroic actions to help others were inspired by 9/11. Three winners will receive two round-trip tickets and accommodations to a Thanksgiving Day NFL game this year where they will be recognized on the field.
By Christopher Dawson and Ben Burnstein, CNN
Twenty years ago, terrorists seized control of four airliners, killed 2,977 people and shook the national conscience of the United States. But the attacks of 9/11 also aroused a sense of patriotism, duty and civic resolve not seen in generations. In the two decades since that tragic moment, a spirit of service has transformed September 11 into a day to make a positive difference.
911Day.org, a website enabling people to search by city for volunteer opportunities, hopes to facilitate 20 million acts of kindness and charity for the 20-year remembrance of 9/11.
Volunteering on September 11
September 11 is designated by Congress as the annual National Day of Service and Remembrance, and organizations across the country are hosting volunteer opportunities in all 50 states.
Here are some of the ways you can sign up to participate.
Charities have distributed funds over the last 20 years to help the families who lost loved ones and offer assistance for the rescue teams facing health issues. They have provided financial support, covered medical expenses and offered mentoring and scholarships for children.
“It’s been a gift to watch these kids grow up and become the future leaders of America,” Rhianna Roddy, the executive director of the Families of Freedom Scholarship Fund told CNN. “Over the years the number of eligible students grew because of the increasing numbers of cancers and exposure faced by the rescue workers. But we are committed to get them all through.”
Here are the organizations that you can support on our 9/11 Public Good campaign.
The FealGood Foundation provides advocacy and support to 9/11 responders who are now dealing with catastrophic health issues.
The Families of Freedom Scholarship Fund distributes financial aid to children of 9/11 victims.
Tuesday’s Children supports youth and families impacted by 9/11, and the post-9/11 Military Families of the Fallen, who have suffered losses as a ripple effect of the 9/11 tragedy.
The Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation sets up 5K runs nationwide to raise money for veterans and first responders who lost limbs in the line of duty.
The Leary Firefighters Foundation helps fire departments receive training and buy new equipment.
There are also maintenance funds included in our campaign for many of the 9/11 memorials. Participating at the day’s events at these memorials, supporting these charities and volunteering your time are all ways we can come together.
“I pray on this 20-year remembrance, that we all put aside our differences and ideologies and unite around those we lost that day,” John Feal, the founder of the FealGood foundation told CNN. “We are all stakeholders of 9/11, and we are all connected by it.”
Robyn Higley has always hated September. It’s the month when everything bad happens, when her spirits, generally so bright and bubbly the rest of the year, grow bleak and deflated.
She feels sad in September. Though she doesn’t fully understand why.
As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, she knows that this September is going to be worse than even the 19 others she has lived through. The media will endlessly reprise that terrible day, there will be an outpouring of patriotic fervor and emoting, and she will be even more on show than in previous years.
“I do not like it all,” she said. “Yes I get it, the 20th is a big thing. But there’s so much expectation of how I’m supposed to feel. People expect this grieving little girl who’s so heartbroken. But I’m almost 20 years old, I’m grown up now.”
It’s complicated being Robyn Higley around 9/11. How should she grieve for the father whom she never met? What should she make of the label that has been pinned to her throughout her life – “9/11 baby” – when she herself was not even there on that tragic day?
On 11 September 2001 her father, Robert Higley – Robbie as he was known to all – went to work on the 92nd floor of the south tower of New York’s World Trade Center. An insurance executive, he had started a new job three months before and was excited that day to have been asked to step up as acting manager.
When the north tower was struck at 8.46am, Robbie called his wife Vycki and told her that something had happened in the other building but that he was fine. “It was an agonizingly short conversation when I look back on it now,” Vycki Higley said.
It took Vycki time to piece together what happened next. Her husband helped evacuate 12 of his colleagues, ushering them into an elevator that was one of the last to reach the ground floor before United Airlines flight 175 slammed into the south tower at 9.03am.
Robbie didn’t make it out. He chose not to get into the elevator because he wanted to “do the managerial thing”, Vycki said, and make sure everyone else was all right.
Vycki was left a widow on 9/11, a single mother caring for her four-year-old daughter Amanda. She was also heavily pregnant with Robyn.
By the time Robyn was born seven weeks later, on 3 November 2001, the “9/11 baby” was already a celebrity. Such was the level of interest in her as a newborn victim of the twin towers attacks that a camera crew from ABC News’ 20/20 was present in the delivery room at her birth.
“It was hilarious,” Robyn said. “When my mom went into labour she got to the hospital and found ABC News already waiting for her.”
Robyn Higley is one of 105 children who were in the womb when their fathers were killed in the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. As a member of this exceptionally rarified club, she entered the world and grew up in an environment in which her identity had already been set for her.
As a young child she started to understand that something monumental had happened on the day her father lost his life, but she had no idea how to process it. “I knew what 9/11 was about but I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel. Those are very complex questions for a five-year-old,” she said.
Vycki was equally blindsided by the challenge of bringing up two young girls in the wake of the booming calamity of the terrorist attacks. What was she supposed to tell them?
“Nobody gave anybody a book,” she said. “There wasn’t a twin towers manual telling us what to do, how to raise two young children who lost their father in this tragic thing.”
There were issues for Robyn with her older sister Amanda. They were best friends and extremely close but their contrasting experiences of 9/11 – Amanda aged four, Robyn yet to be born – led to tensions and rivalries.
“There’s a lot of jealousy between them,” Vycki said. “As a 9/11 baby born after her father died, Robyn got all the media attention, which annoyed Amanda. But Robyn is jealous that Amanda had four years with their father, and she had nothing.”
Every time 11 September rolled round the spotlight on Robyn would intensify. “It was awful throughout high school. People who weren’t even my friends would come up to me and be like, ‘Hey, how are you doing? Are you OK?’ And they’d say it in a way like they expected me to want the sympathy and the pity.”
At times she got the eerie feeling that people wanted her to burst into tears or have a dramatic breakdown. “They wanted me to collapse. Every time a 9/11 announcement would play at the moment the first tower fell and I would start to react, you would see all the eyes gravitate towards me.”
This year for the first time Robyn, Amanda and Vycki will attend the official 9/11 commemoration at Ground Zero. Having shunned the globally broadcast event for so long, Vycki said she had come to the view that “this just seems the year to do it”.
It’s already causing Robyn some distress. Seven weeks after the 20th anniversary she will herself turn 20, and that has got her thinking about how she is not that many years away from 29, the age her father was on 9/11.
“I’m getting closer to the age he was when he died. When I’m 30 I’m going to be doing things he never got to do, like dropping off my kid at kindergarten, which he never did with me. That is insanely baffling when you think about that,” she said.
The 105 babies of 9/11 are a subset of a much larger community of children who lost a parent in the twin towers, the Pentagon or on board United Airlines flight 93, which crashed in a field near Shanksville. All told, some 3,051 kids were bereaved – usually from the death of their father given that seven out of eight of the victims of 9/11 were male.
For the past 20 years Terry Sears has been immersing herself in the world of the children of 9/11. She is executive director of Tuesday’s Children, a non-profit set up days after the attacks on a mission to provide support and long-term healing for the kids left behind.
In the runup to the anniversary Sears has been rewatching old footage shot by the charity in the early years when they would take the children on day trips. What has struck her most is simply the scale of the loss.
“You’d have a picnic in New Jersey or a beach party on Long Island, and hundreds of kids would turn up who all lost a parent on that day. It was such concentrated loss. Looking at the footage today, it’s still overwhelming.”
Over the years Sears has come to see shared experiences between the children. One of the most potent was the ever-present nature of 9/11, the sense that you couldn’t escape its grasp no matter how hard you tried.
“It was on the news every day. Just as you started watching TV after school those images of the buildings collapsing would come back on. So for 9/11 kids, their stories were played out in public every day for years.”
Sears noted another powerful shared experience that Robyn Higley also articulated – the tyranny of other people’s expectations. “So many 9/11 kids told me that over the years they would try just to be themselves,” Sears said. “They would get a new job and would be so disappointed when someone said to them ‘I heard you lost your dad’, because they didn’t want the pity, they just wanted to be normal.”
Mike Friedman is intimately acquainted with the shadow that 9/11 has placed over its children. He and his twin brother Dan were 11 on the day they lost their father.
“9/11 is the only tragedy that is associated with a specific date, so nobody lets you forget it,” Mike said. “It’s on the news, on TV, on the internet. You never become fully immune to that – in the week up to 9/11 I’m never feeling like my normal self.”
Even before the attacks, the brothers had a special connection to the enormous World Trade Center skyscrapers in downtown Manhattan. The link stems from the most notable feature about the brothers – their height. Mike is 6ft 11in and Dan 6ft 9in.
For years they were the tallest people at their school, teachers included, and they acquired a nickname that paid homage to their stature. It was given to them by the basketball superstar Magic Johnson, who they had the chance to meet at one of their mother’s work functions; he signed an autograph for them, writing: “To the Twin Towers, best of luck”.
The nickname stuck. Mike and Dan were now the Twin Towers, well before their dad Andrew Friedman, a 44-year-old equity sales trader, went to work that day on the 92nd floor of the north tower.
There are striking differences between the experiences of the twins and Robyn Higley. Unlike her, they were very much present on the day and vividly recall being called out of class by the school principal and told a plane had hit their father’s building in New York but not to worry, he was fine.
They went about the rest of the day as though nothing had happened. They remember having fun at a neighbour’s house, swimming in the pool and enjoying a barbecue.
It was not until the following day that their mother, Lisa Friedman Clark, sat them down and told them: “Guys, I don’t think your dad’s coming home.”
But there are also affinities among the 9/11 children. Like Robyn, it took the twins many years to scratch together what had happened to their father. Lisa wanted to shield them from painful details until they were old enough to take them in.
So they grew up thinking that their father had been OK until the north tower collapsed, that he had had “plenty of air”, as Lisa told them. Dan was left with the impression that the 92nd floor had been a quiet and contemplative place until the very end.
When they were in their early 20s their mother shared with them the truth. “She told us that he had an hour and a half of hell, trapped on the floor. He was coughing a lot when she was on the phone with him. There was smoke, the walls were caving in, the stairwell was inaccessible, people were choking and jumping out of the building. That was painful to hear.”
All the 9/11 children have had struggles over the years. The Friedmans saw child therapists to help them through the grieving process.
Robyn had severe bouts of paranoia as a child. She would have separation anxiety from her mother, and would enter a movie theatre only after someone had scouted it and declared it to be safe.
“I grew up knowing that my dad walked into work one day and never walked out. That made me very scared to walk into any situation.”
Memorabilia have helped them gain a closer connection with their lost fathers. The twins have quilts that a stranger from Oregon knitted them, made out of Andrew’s college shirts and other clothes, and Dan keeps one of his dad’s golf clubs in his locker at the Long Island club where they play.
Robyn has a stuffed animal, a pink bunny, which her father bought for her when he and Vycki learned that their unborn child was going to be a girl. She has found the bunny very soothing over the years, helping her to confront one of her greatest anguishes – that her father never knew who she was.
“I struggled with that for a long time, that he doesn’t know who I am. But he knew I was a girl, I know that because he bought me stuff and that gave me a little comfort. He knew about me, who I was; he was excited about me.”
The 9/11 kids have also had shared moments of unexpected exhilaration, none stranger than the killing in May 2011 of Osama bin Laden. His death in Pakistan at the hands of US Navy Seal team six was announced while Robyn and her family were celebrating her sister Amanda’s 14th birthday. “We celebrated with a chocolate cake. It was really good,” she said.
There were even what you might call perks of being a 9/11 kid celebrity. Robyn was taken backstage at the Broadway hit musical Hairspray. “I got to stand in a giant hairspray canister – that was the coolest thing for a six-year-old.”
Every summer for a week she went to “America’s Camp”, a play setting in the countryside expressly for the children of 9/11. She came to regard it as a safe haven, a place where she didn’t have to talk about “it”, where you didn’t have to explain yourself.
As the years passed, Robyn said, her appreciation of the father she never met deepened. When she was young he was just a photograph to her; now she has fleshed out his profile into a rounded human being.
She sees him as this “crazy funny goofball who liked to make people laugh. He was just one of the greatest people ever.”
All things considered, Robyn is amazed by how well she has emerged, the 9/11 baby metamorphosed into an independent, strong woman. “I’m insanely surprised by how good I’ve turned out given how much there was against me.”
She has only two regrets. She longs for her father to be around to see her blossom. “I wish he could see just how proud I am of myself.”
The other regret relates to 9/11 itself. Just occasionally she allows herself to reflect on how Robbie sacrificed his own life to save others. “He was a hero and I love that,” she said. “But there are moments I get mad – why didn’t he get into that elevator?”
Photo credit Elsa/Getty Images
Football is officially back Thursday, with the Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers facing the Dallas Cowboys, and as part of the moments before the game, the NFL will honor families affected by the attacks 20 years ago.
The league said it turned to the group Tuesday’s Children to look for families to honor during its opening week. The group works to ensure families who dealt with acts of mass violence have support.
Among those being honored will be the Cayne family. They currently live in Florida, and lost their father on 9/11.
Then on Sunday, a tribute narrated by actor and former FDNY firefighter Steve Buscemi will air before all 1 p.m. games. It’ll highlight America’s resiliency in the days after the attacks on America.
Music therapist Juliette Candela will then perform the National Anthem from the Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum in Manhattan.
Candela was also selected by Tuesday’s Children, as her dad lost his life in the World Trade Center on 9/11.
For the Jets and Giants’ opening games, team members will wear NYPD, FDNY and Port Authority police hats.
Players from around the league will also wear 9/11 ribbon helmet decals and coaches, media members and other NFL employees will wear 9/11 lapel pins.
Some teams are also due to participate in the 9/11 Day of Service, alongside other league members.
Courtesy of Tuesday’s Children
Out of the ashes of despair following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks came a non-profit organization, Tuesday’s Children, which aims to serve families and communities impacted by terrorism, military conflict, and mass violence for the past 20 years.
Tuesday’s Children’s Executive Director Terry Sears has spent the past two decades working with 9/11 family members, providing long-term support for those who suffered the ripple effects of the terror attacks and ensuing war.
Sears prides her organization on their steadfast work aiding children impacted by the destruction of the World Trade Center as they grew up through mentorship and programing. She estimated that there were 108 children born after 9/11, creating even more youth who would grow up without knowing their loved ones. Even though many of these babies are now young adults attending college, she emphasizes that they still need the organization’s support due to the emotional and mental impact of losing a parent.
“We know from mental health experts that children grieve differently. It’s not like an adult where you have a loss, and you have a tough year or two or three. For kids, as they become adults, as they become teenagers often that is when the loss hits them the hardest. It’s been important that there be a community of understanding and a community of support as they find their way into adulthood,” Sears said.
Courtesy of Tuesday’s Children
Tuesday’s Children was founded as a base program to fill the void due to a lost parent, focusing on bonding activities, mental health services, and simply serving as a sturdy shoulder for families to lean on while attempting to find some stability.
Sears has witnessed the devastation wrought within her community of Manhasset after 9/11, stating that at least 41 families in the Long Island community lost a loved one. This left behind 55 children without a parent.
“It was something that needed to be addressed, that these kids had a commonality of loss throughout the Tri-State area,” Sears said.
Tuesday’s Children initially functioned as resource that featured trained mentors who would function as a big brother or sister to take the youth to a baseball game, picnic, or other fun event. This mentorship transformed into surrogate family members over the years, from simply hanging out together to attending weddings and baptisms, creating an everlasting bond.
Courtesy of Tuesday’s Children
“As those kids got older, we decided to help them with resume writing, how to create a LinkedIn profile, interview skills—filling it a bit with that guiding light that they had lost in their life,” Sears said, adding, “Our program does not replace that loved one lost, but tries to fill in a bit. Tries to supplement what the surviving parent is doing. While you never really get anywhere close to bringing that person back, you then have more of a leveled playing field for skill-based life that one would have if that parent was there.”
After two decades, the adolescents are now grown up and moved on, even serving in the military, studying in college, and pursuing their careers, they still keep in touch with Tuesday’s Children as mentors to those who’ve also face loss due to terrorism, mass violence, and veterans who have made the ultimate sacrifice.
Courtesy of Tuesday’s Children
Brian Leavey lost his father, a lieutenant with Ladder 15 in South Street Seaport on 9/11. After being mentored as a child, the process has come full cycle now that he has become a mentor himself. Working with a young man named Connor, who is a Gold Star family member, which is a term the organization uses to label their commitment to serving families of a fallen service member—Connor lost his father to COVID-19. Over the past year, Brian and Connor have been getting to know each other, bonding through their shared loss.
“It’s incredibly and personally rewarding to watch these kids grow up,” Sears said, sharing that Tuesday’s Children will be providing consultation to organizations who need advice on how to help those who’ve lost a parent due to COVID-19.
Andrea is another mentor who continues to work with the program after directly being impacted by 9/11. Both of her son’s were in a mentoring program with Tuesday’s Children, and she saw first-hand the profound effect it had on her family. She decided to pay it forward by becoming a mentor for a girl named Skyler, who lost her father due to post-9/11 illness.
“Skyler’s endless energy, vivacious personality and entertaining stories never cease to amaze me,” said Andrea. “I find our time together to be simultaneously uplifting and rewarding.”
CLICK HERE to watch now.
La actriz y productora Iliana Guibert abrió su corazón para contar cómo vivió la tragedia del 9/11 en donde lamentablemente su esposo perdió la vida, y compartió las últimas palabras que él le dijo minutos antes de que el edificio donde se encontraba se derrumbara hace 20 años.
It has been 20 years now and I still can’t forget the look of sadness my teammates and I saw on the faces of the first responders at Ground Zero days after the attacks.
They all looked so tired, and mentally and physically drained. They stayed there for days on end and were on a mission to find someone alive. Sadly, that never happened.
It was such an eerie scene. I felt like we were in a war-torn country. There was so much destruction all around us.
I remember saying to my teammates Al Leiter and Todd Zeile, “What are we doing here? They don’t want to see some baseball players now.”
But you know what? I was wrong. Our presence there gave the responders a little diversion. They had questions about how the Mets were doing. We brought down some Mets shirts and caps and exchanged them for police and firefighter hats.
That led to us wearing the hats of every service agency in New York City that suffered a loss on 9/11.
I am proud of the many things our team did that September but wearing the hats was something special. I remember we got a call from the wife of a court officer saying how much she appreciated us remembering her husband. It’s that kind of thing that was bigger than baseball and made us feel like we were making a difference.
The guys on the 2001 team understood our mission. As a native New Yorker, 9/11 was personal for me and was personal for everyone, from ownership to the players and people who worked in the clubhouse.
We knew we had to play baseball, but we also knew we had another perhaps even more important job to do, which was to help the city heal.
We were set to open a series in Pittsburgh on Sept. 11. We were supposed to have a team union meeting and I got a call from Don Fehr, the union chief, saying what had happened and that the games would be postponed.
Our hotel was close to a federal building and MLB asked us to move to a motel in the suburbs because no one knew what to expect. We stayed there for two days and headed back to New York by bus. The trip was more than nine hours long with general conversation throughout the trip until we approached the George Washington Bridge.
Then Todd Zeile just blurted out, “Hey guys, look to the left and see the smoke.” The towers were gone and not a word was said for the rest of the trip.
When we got back home, it was a different Shea Stadium. The parking lot was turned into a recovery area. People from all over began dropping off supplies to go to Ground Zero. We would work out in the morning and in the afternoon, under the direction of Sue Lucchi, Kevin McCarthy and our manager Bobby Valentine, we packed the trucks with food, clothing and medical supplies to go downtown.
No one said no to anything. Bobby was our leader, but all the guys were out there too. Al Leiter, Mike Piazza, Glendon Rusch, Lenny Harris, Rey Ordoñez, Mark Johnson, Desi Relaford, Marcus Lawton, Bruce Chen, Tsuyoshi Shinjo, Robin Ventura, Vance Wilson, Joe McEwing, Edgardo Alfonzo, Jay Payton, Armando Benitez, Steve Trachsel, Todd Zeile, Mookie Wilson, Dave Wallace and John Stearns. Everyone did something and we were out there every day.
Not all our efforts were loading trucks at Shea Stadium. Each day there was a different firehouse or hospital to visit. We became affiliated with Tuesday’s Children, an organization which took care of the kids who lost a parent on 9/11. We later threw a holiday party for the kids, gave them tickets to games and tried our best to fill the voids in their lives.
We got back on the field in Pittsburgh on Sept. 15 and that was hard. I remember there was a gigantic poster with thousands of signatures next to our locker room with messages of encouragement for us. It seemed like the entire world was rooting for the Mets.
We swept the Pirates and were still in a pennant race. Now there was the debate of when we should start playing again in New York.
I’m so proud that we were part of the first sporting event in New York City after 9/11. Going to Shea that night on Sept. 21 for a game against the Atlanta Braves, I never saw so much security. But once I got inside I knew we would be safe. There was police all around us.
The ceremony was something I will never forget. I still have a tear in my eye when I think of the bagpipers coming onto the field.
Let me say this in a nice way: There was no love lost between the Mets and the Braves. But on that night, we were all brothers. We embraced each other and Bobby V and Braves manager Bobby Cox gave each other a big hug. This was truly a different night.
When I went in to pitch, I was as nervous as I have ever been in any other game. I knew I had a job to do and I had to concentrate.
In the bottom of the eighth inning when Mike Piazza hit the “home run heard around the world” that won the game for us, the stadium shook. I can still hear the cries of “USA! USA!”
I looked into the stands and people were smiling for the first time.
After the game we all went into the dugout to sign autographs for the kids. I remember meeting Carol Gies and her three sons, Ronnie, Bobby and Tommy. Carol’s husband Ronnie was a firefighter who was lost on 9/11. All three of her kids went on to become firemen.
We didn’t win the pennant in 2001 but we won so much more. We helped put a Band-Aid on a gigantic wound and let people know that life could go on again. I was fortunate enough to accomplish some good things in my career, but for me nothing was more meaningful than what our guys did 20 years ago.
We helped New York City be a better place and that is more important than any ring or championship.
I am looking forward to the game against the Yankees on 9/11 at Citi Field. I am sure it will be an emotional night for all of us. I know the field will be filled with first responders and other people who served during 9/11. We are going to have about 10 guys from our 2001 team there too, and it will be good to reminisce with all of them.
Whatever we did back then, we didn’t want any attention for ourselves. We did it for one reason only and that was to help.
Once again I am so proud of what we did in 2001, from wearing the hats, to donating a day’s salary to Rusty Staub’s police and firefighter charities, to the visits to Ground Zero, to the visits to the hospitals, to the meet-and-greets with Tuesday’s Children, or to just lending an ear to someone who needed to talk.
I now live in lower Manhattan and I walk past the reflection pools at the World Trade Center almost every day. When I think about 9/11, I am guided by one simple sentence: “Never forget; never, ever forget.”
John Franco is a Brooklyn native and all-star relief pitcher who played for the New York Mets from 1990 to 2004.
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