25-Years Later: NY, NY – Here We Come – Me, My Daughter and Her Bestie! 

Tonight, I’m boarding a JetBlue flight to New York City. Sitting next to me will be my daughter, August, who just turned 16 and asked for exactly one thing for her birthday: to see her beloved New York. Behind us will be her best friend Savannah and Savannah’s mom, Erica—my dear friend—who have never set foot in the city that has shaped so much of our lifves.

We land on Sept. 11. Twenty-five years to the day.

I’ve been turning this trip over in my mind for weeks, and I keep coming back to the same feeling: I don’t want to write another history of what happened that day. There are documentaries and timelines and news archives for that. What I want to write about is where I was and how it felt. 

What it felt like to love a city from three thousand miles away while it was under attack, and what it feels like, a quarter century later, to walk my daughter through it, together. To share an impactful moment of U.S. history. 

Where I Was

In September of 2001, I was a young professional woman working in San Francisco for Schwartz Communications, a PR agency headquartered back east in Boston. I got the call early in the morning from Lauren Carpenter, one of my supervisors. Nobody was coming into the office, she told me. The Twin Towers had been hit.

I remember the shock landing somewhere very specific in my chest, because New York wasn’t an abstraction to me. I’d met my dear friend Kunjali Shah when I was 15 years old, and from that friendship came a habit: I visited New York at least twice a year, every year. Kunjali was a die-hard New Yorker, the kind who actually lived it, on 86th between Lexington and Park on the Upper East Side. So when Lauren told me what had happened, my first instinct wasn’t to turn on the news. It was to call my New York people.

I got Kunjali and the rest of my New York gal pals on the phone to hear it from someone who was actually there, not a broadcaster. She told me the city was in shock. That chaos had taken over. I remember just listening, three thousand miles away, feeling completely useless and completely heartbroken for a city that wasn’t technically mine but had somehow become mine anyway.

Not long after, my friends from Schwartz Communications showed up at my house, Tara Dugan and Lisa Perlmutter, both of whom had transferred from the Boston office to San Francisco. They carried that East Coast energy and love with them wherever they went, and they too spent real time in New York. My boyfriend Derek Schneeberger also arrived at my frontdoor. He too spent time in New York (fun fact, his sister is “influencer” Mel Robbins). We spent the entire day glued to the television, holding each other. There was no social media back then. No group texts, no live feeds from strangers’ phones. Just the TV, and each other, and the phone calls to people who actually knew the ground truth.

I remember watching Mayor Rudy Giuliani at ground zero almost immediately, and thinking—regardless of anyone’s politics—what a role model, to walk towards his people, leaning in like a leader should lean in. 

And, I remember feeling something that I don’t think gets talked about enough: love. A fierce, aching love for the people of New York, and for the people of the Pentagon too, because Washington’s loss so often gets overshadowed by the towers. The World Trade Center was the envy of the world. Wall Street. The very heart of American capitalism, brought down by terrorists in airplanes. It still doesn’t compute, even twenty-five years later. It shouldn’t have to.

Where We’re Going

Now, that same love is what’s putting me on a plane.

August always wants to visit New York—she’s obsessed with it, genuinely obsessed, the way I was at her age. To her, New York is the epicenter of everything: life, activity, ambition, business, fashion, food, possibility. And this year, for her sixteenth birthday, she’s getting just that with her very best friend, Savannah. She’s going to share the city with Savy, and with Erica, who has been my dear friend for years. Savvy and Erica have never been to New York and we can’t imagine what an incredible experience to share with such amazing people on a historical, sadly historical, weekend. 

We’ll take the Big Red double-decker bus, the tourist loop, so Savy and Erica can get the full picture, the guidebook version of downtown, which includes Ground Zero. Given that it’s the 25th anniversary, what I keep calling, in my head, the “sad-iversary,” I don’t think we’ll get off the bus at that stop. I can only imagine the crowds. And more than that, I want to leave room for the families who will be there that day to grieve their own. That space belongs to them, not to tourists, even tourists with hearts as full as ours. We plan to go back on Saturday instead, quietly, to pay our respects to the people lost that day and to the first responders who gave everything.

I’ll be honest: I’m a little scared. Landing in New York on this particular day, of all days, isn’t nothing. But my husband is a first responder. Every single day, he puts himself between danger and the people who need protecting, and I think about the responders who ran into those towers while everyone else was running out. Giuliani wasn’t standing there alone; he had an army of ordinary heroes beside him who chose, in the worst moment imaginable, to go toward the fire. My fear feels small next to that. It feels like the right kind of small.

Why I’m Writing This Down

I wanted to write this not as a history lesson, but as a love letter, to New York, to the people who make it, to the first responders who protect people like the ones I love, and to this country. I want it to be a reminder that history isn’t just something that happened; it’s something we carry, and if we’re not careful, something that repeats. We owe it to the people whose lives were taken, whose families were shattered, whose businesses and dreams were destroyed that day, to remember them not as a headline but as human beings who deserved a normal Tuesday.

So on 9/11, I’ll be flying into New York with my daughter, her best friend, and one of my closest friends, 25 years after the worst day New York ever had. And I’ll be doing it with an enormous amount of pride, pride in my daughter for loving this city the way I do, pride in the people of New York for everything they rebuilt, and pride in a country that, on its hardest day, still had people who ran toward the danger instead of away from it.

We will never forget. And this week, we’ll remember together, in person, on the ground where it happened.

About BOCA Marketing Agency

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