Last night I watched an episode of 60 Minutes that focused on the firefighters in New York City on the day of the awful events that has come to be known as 9/11. Whenever I hear stories of that day, I feel it in my chest; I feel tears welling up. I don’t know anyone who perished or survived. I do remember my own experience of it…where I was, who I spoke to, watching the TV screen in horror. 60 Minutes spotlighted a firefighter who by chance was not sent into the Twin Towers that day, but her close colleague and mentor did go and lost his life. The concern she expressed was that 9/11 would become just a page in a history book. 

Today, my news feed highlights memorial events for 9/11 of 22 years ago. Some facts noted by CBS News:

• Nearly 3,000 people were killed after four planes were hijacked by attackers from the Al Qaeda terrorist group.
• Two planes flew into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York. One plane was flown into the Pentagon. 
• Another aircraft crashed into an open field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back — the only plane that didn’t reach its intended destination.

These are some of the facts, cold and stark, that were compiled about that day. But like other momentous events that occurred during my lifetime, JFK’s assassination, the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, most everyone who was around that day in the U.S. has their own story. I was at my job at a small private university. I’ve written my story of that day. Even though it’s a very small, relatively personal story, I wanted to set it down in writing as my way of never forgetting, of mourning. 

When I was teaching I always brought the events from 9/11 into the classroom. I felt it was part of my responsibility as a teacher. I’d ask what they knew about that day. Of course, in the early 2000’s, the students I taught were in middle or high school when 9/11 occurred. But by 2020, the first-year college students in my classes were barely toddlers in 2001. The event would have been less immediate for them. Their stories would be different. I felt it was important that they acknowledged not just what happened, but how they understood it, what they made of it. I shared what the poet Lucille Clifton made of that event in her suite of poems written during that week called “september song in 7 days.” Her poems are multi-leveled, from the public to the personal and back. The lesson was also about how events become history. I hoped that the students would see that history is more than just remote facts and dates. I invited them to question everything they’ve learned as “history,” likely presented as fact, may not necessarily be the “truth.” The students were to select one of the poems from the grouping to use as a starting point to write their own “story” in any genre.  

In her piece memorializing Lucille Clifton in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Alexander stated, “No matter how elaborate the words they use, poets strive to tell elemental truths. As Clifton often reminded her acolytes, “truth and facts are two different things.” 

Lucille Clifton understood that responsibility to remember and tell the truth.