There are photographs from September 11 that you can never unsee. This is one of them.
A human being falling from the World Trade Center.
Not a statistic.
Not a number in a history book.
A person.
Someone who woke up that morning expecting an ordinary Tuesday. Someone who had people who loved them. Someone who had plans for later that day, for the weekend, for the future.
And then, in a matter of minutes, they were trapped hundreds of feet above the ground—facing circumstances so horrific that most of us cannot even comprehend them.
The people who fell or jumped from the towers are sometimes left out of the story of 9/11 because the images are almost too painful to confront. But they were victims too. They deserve to be remembered with dignity, not forgotten because the way they died is difficult to look at.
Every time I see this photograph, my heart breaks all over again.
Nearly 3,000 lives were stolen that day. Thousands of individual stories. Thousands of families whose lives were divided forever into before September 11 and after.
As another September 11 approaches, remember them all.
The firefighters climbing the stairs while everyone else was coming down.
The police officers and first responders.
The passengers and crews aboard the planes.
The people trapped above the impact zones.
And the souls who fell from those towers because there was nowhere else to go.
May we never become so removed from that day that these images stop hurting.
Never forget. 🇺🇸 We won't. But NYC for sure did.