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Twenty-five years ago, on September 11, 2001, my wife Grace was at her desk on the 105th floor of the North Tower. She was 29 years old. She will always be 29 years old.
Twenty-five years is long enough to learn that grief doesn’t end. It learns your calendar. Somewhere in early August it starts: the tightening, the bracing, the counting down to the morning I return to the place where Grace was taken from us.
It’s there that I, along with every other family at Ground Zero, remember our own Grace. We remember how she was the kind of person the rest of us build our lives around without ever realizing it. We remember how her last summer, her sister told us another baby was coming, and Grace hoped out loud for a girl. It was a girl, they named her Grace. That little girl is twenty-four now, and everything she knows about her aunt is a story someone told her. In Grace’s memorial guest book, a friend called her a brilliant light to everyone who knew her. She was, and the world lost nearly three thousand lights that morning. Every one of them was somebody’s Grace.
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The ceremony itself is the one mercy in it all. The bell at 8:46. The silence. The names, all 2,983 of them, read out loud by loved ones, for hours, until every single person is remembered. No speeches, no politicians at the microphone, just the names. Whoever built it that way understood something: for one morning a year, the most famous piece of ground in America belongs to ordinary grieving people, and to no one else.
That morning is getting harder to protect. Every year there are more cameras, more commentary, more people with something to say standing near people who came to mourn. And this year, the twenty-fifth, the year it should be most sacred, the story is already not about the victims. It’s about the mayor.
For weeks now, the coverage of this anniversary has been an argument about the Mayor of New York City. Whether he’ll attend, what his presence means, what he said, what he meant, who’s offended, who’s defending him. Every one of those stories is a story that is not about the 2,983 people who were murdered, and every day of it, asks grieving families to spend the season we need for remembering on a political argument instead.
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We are one month from the 25th anniversary of the worst day of most of our lives. So I will be plain about why so many of us cannot treat this mayor as just another dignitary in the crowd. In 2020, he called the NYPD “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” and demanded it be defunded. Twenty-three NYPD officers died saving people in those towers, and their names are cut into the memorial he would stand beside. When New Yorkers asked him, again and again, to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” a phrase many of us hear as a call for more mornings like the one that took Grace, he said it means different things to different people. He has praised a Brooklyn imam who served as a character witness for the Blind Sheikh, the man convicted of plotting terror attacks against this city. To the families in that plaza, these are wounds.
The anniversary of September 11th asks one thing of everyone who stands on that ground: an unambiguous rejection of the violence and the ideology that caused it, without hesitation and without ambiguity. The families should not have to wonder where their mayor stands.
When the cameras find him, and they will find him, the day stops belonging to the families and starts belonging to the fight.
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That’s why I started a petition on Change.org asking that this year’s ceremony stay focused on the victims and their families. More than 83,000 people have joined me by signing the petition at change.org/911Ceremony. Not because they hate anyone, because they want one morning free of political controversy.
So this is my ask of the mayor, and it’s a simple one: on the morning of September 11th, let the families have the plaza. Removing a distraction isn’t a punishment, it’s a kindness.
Grief doesn’t have a party. It doesn’t care who you voted for. Somewhere in those hours of names next month, a voice will say “Grace Catherine Galante,” and for a few seconds the whole world will hold just her. That is what the morning is for.
Twenty-five years. One morning. Let us have it.
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