My dad died on Flight 93. I miss the way America responded

As we mark 25 years, I find myself grappling with a different kind of grief — not for my father, but for the country we shared in his memory.

When I was 10 years old, trauma arrived quietly, through the voice of my pediatrician. I was out of school that morning with a toe infection when the doctor walked into the exam room and told my mother and me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York City.

At 10, you live in a world that is small and immediate. Barely a week earlier, we had spent Labor Day weekend at my grandfather’s home at Candlewood Lake in Connecticut, sailing, cooking and living inside the sweet, unthinking comfort of an entirely ordinary weekend together.

That morning in the doctor’s office, my mind did not connect the news to the fact that hours earlier my dad had kissed us goodbye at our Greenwich home, driven to Newark Airport and boarded an early-morning flight to San Francisco to visit his brothers. 

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