There are dates that never remain simply dates on a calendar.

They divide life into before and after.

September 11, 2001, was one of them.

Twenty-five years have passed, yet ask almost anyone who lived through that day where they were when they first heard the news, and they will probably remember.

I certainly do.

It was a Tuesday morning, and for me it began as an ordinary day.

I was living in Astoria, Queens, with my husband and daughter. I was getting ready to go to a meeting of Bryant Park Toastmasters, a wonderful public-speaking club I belonged to at the time. We met for an hour during lunch in the Edelman building in Times Square.

I planned to take the subway into Manhattan.

The television was on while I was getting ready, but I wasn’t really watching it. It was simply background noise.

Then something on the screen caught my attention.

A plane had hit one of the Twin Towers.

My first thought was that it had to be a terrible accident. Perhaps the pilot had lost control. Even the television commentators seemed confused about what they were seeing.

Then the second plane struck the other tower.

Everything changed.

This was no accident.

Someone was doing this deliberately.

My Toastmasters meeting was instantly forgotten.

So was almost everything else.

My first real thought was my daughter.

She was at school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We were in Queens. Bridges, tunnels and public transportation were closing or becoming inaccessible.

Suddenly Manhattan, normally so close, seemed impossibly far away.

In moments like that, the world becomes very small.

You are not thinking about international affairs or history.

You are thinking:

Where is my child?

Is she safe?

How do I get to her?

Fortunately, my husband found a solution. His car had press identification, and the police allowed him to cross the Queensboro Bridge. He reached our daughter and brought her safely home.

Only then could we begin trying to understand what had happened.

But nothing felt understandable.

The familiar New York skyline had changed before our eyes. Images that should have belonged in a disaster movie were happening only a few miles from our home.

And then came the smell.

For days afterward—and, in my memory, for much longer—the smell of what had burned downtown lingered in the air.

It was a constant reminder that what we had watched on television was not television.

It was here.

It was real.

Nearly 3,000 people had lost their lives.

Thousands of families would never again experience September 11 as an ordinary date.

Two days later, on Thursday, September 13, my husband and I had tickets for an evening at the Metropolitan Opera House.

We seriously considered not going.

New York was still in shock. The devastation downtown was almost impossible to comprehend, and attending the opera somehow seemed inappropriate.

But finally we decided to go.

Life had to continue.

I remember walking into that magnificent hall and seeing it half empty.

Security checked our bags.

People spoke quietly.

There was a profound sadness in the air.

I don’t remember what opera we saw that evening.

But I remember the atmosphere.

Twenty-five years later, I can still feel it.

We were not there because we had forgotten what had happened only two days earlier.

We were there because we hadn’t forgotten.

And because, somehow, New York had to begin living again.

Summer scenes from the south pool in New York, Thursday, July 12, 2018. Photo by Jin S. Lee, 9/11 Memorial

Not long afterward, I attended a meeting with Michael Bloomberg, who at the time was running for mayor of New York City.

The room was packed.

He spoke about his plans for the city, but after all these years I don’t remember most of the details.

I remember one sentence.

“We will heal.”

At least, that is how those words have remained in my memory for twenty-five years.

They were simple words, but at that moment they meant something.

New York did not feel healed.

It felt wounded, confused, and frightened. Smoke still hung over downtown. Photographs of missing people covered walls and fences. Everyone seemed to know someone who had lost someone.

Yet there he was talking about a future.

When the meeting ended, people crowded around him, reaching out to shake his hand.

I was somewhere in that crowd when, unexpectedly, he reached through the people around him and took my hand.

It lasted only a moment.

But strangely, I remember that too.

Maybe because in those weeks after September 11, small human gestures seemed to carry more meaning than usual.

A handshake.

A stranger helping another stranger.

A theater opening its doors.

Someone saying:

We will heal.

Family members gather for the annual 9/11 Memorial and Museum anniversary ceremony in New York, NY on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2018. Photo by Ben Hider, 9/11 Memorial

And eventually, New York did.

Not by forgetting.

Healing does not mean forgetting.

Perhaps it means learning how to carry what happened without allowing it to destroy everything that comes afterward.

September 11 remains a reminder that peace and safety can never simply be taken for granted.

We often speak about peace as though it were merely the absence of war.

But perhaps peace begins much earlier.

It begins with how we see another human being.

It begins with whether someone who looks different, believes differently, worships differently or comes from another part of the world is still seen first as a human being.

Before violence becomes physical, something often happens in the mind.

Someone becomes the other.

Someone becomes less human.

Someone’s life becomes less valuable.

That is why remembering September 11 should mean more than remembering where we were or what we saw.

It should remind us how fragile ordinary life can be.

That Tuesday morning, thousands of people woke up, got dressed, kissed their families goodbye, went to work, boarded airplanes, drank coffee, answered phones, and made plans for tomorrow.

They did not know what the day would bring.

Maybe that is one of the most difficult lessons of September 11.

An ordinary morning is never really ordinary.

The people we love should never be taken for granted.

The peaceful routines we barely notice are gifts precisely because they can disappear.

Today, twenty-five years later, I remember the television playing quietly in my apartment in Astoria.

I remember suddenly stopping whatever I was doing.

I remember the second plane.

I remember thinking about my daughter.

I remember a city that seemed to stop breathing.

I remember the smell.

I remember sitting in that half-empty opera house surrounded by strangers sharing the same unspoken grief.

And I remember three simple words spoken shortly afterward:

We will heal.

We did.

But remembering September 11 asks something more of us than simply continuing to live.

Perhaps it asks us to become more conscious about how we live.

To remember those who died.

To appreciate those who are still beside us.

To value an ordinary morning.

To resist hatred before it becomes violence.

To recognize the humanity of people whose lives and beliefs may be very different from our own.

Never forget.

But also—never forget to live.

Photo (above) credit: Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.