Someone mentioned the essay ‘The Lady in the Pink Suit’ by Mike Patterson earlier in this thread. I went looking for it and it really touched me, so thought I’d reproduce it here (https://www.facebook.com/share/1EmWm5VBaW/?mibextid=wwXIfr):
THE LADY IN THE PINK SUIT
25 Years Later
Twenty-five years.
There are people old enough to drink today who were not alive when this happened.
There are adults with careers, marriages and children who know September 11th as history. They have seen the footage. They know the photographs. They have heard people say Never Forget so many times that I sometimes wonder whether the words have become too familiar to mean anything anymore.
I don’t know September 11th as history.
I remember Tuesday morning.
I was late to work. That is a RARITY. But in the pre-bubble days of September 2001, my “late” was comparatively early.
There weren’t a lot of people on the street that Tuesday morning. In fact, Broadway and Park Place was eerily empty for 8:45.
Even before it happened, something wasn’t right about that morning.
I bumped into Richard Sloane, who had just come out of the WTC station, as we both entered the lobby of the Woolworth Building.
“Did you see what just happened? I think a plane just hit the towers,” he said.
Excitedly, I offered that we should be able to get a great view of it from my desk since I stared directly at the North Tower every day.
And then I saw it.
The hole was immense.
“There’s NO WAY a plane did that,” I said. “That has to be a gas leak or something. It’s gonna take months to clean that up.”
Months to clean it up.
Twenty-five years later, that sentence still gets me.
Because I remember actually visualizing it. I pictured myself sitting at that desk every day, doing my work and occasionally looking out the window to watch the crews repair that enormous hole.
Funny what your mind does when you are living through a moment of history but your brain is still desperately trying to make it an ordinary Tuesday morning.
Paper was pouring out of that huge gash and drifting very deliberately south in the significant wind that was blowing.
It looked like 1 World Trade Center was bleeding.
I was on the phone spitefully trying to wake up Matthew Chilsen, who had kept me up watching college football the night before and was directly responsible for both my tardiness and my hangover. I was yelling at him to turn on the television and watch what was happening when I saw something fall out of the hole.
It did NOT blow south.
Everything else was blowing south.
This fell straight down.
I knew what it must be.
But my mind couldn’t process the first one.
Then I refocused on the hole.
And I saw her.
Twenty-five years later, I still see her.
She was young. Blonde. Pretty. She was wearing a business suit that, in my memory, looked at least very much like the pink one pictured here.
And from my office in the Woolworth Building, I watched another human being confront a choice no human being should ever have to make.
Fire and smoke behind her.
A thousand feet of air in front of her.
I watched her make the decision to jump.
I remember how unnatural the physics looked to me as she fell. Human beings aren’t supposed to fall from that height. My brain had no frame of reference for what my eyes were showing it.
And suddenly my mind connected her with the first object I’d seen falling against the wind.
I said three words into the telephone:
“They’re jumping.”
And I dropped the phone.
There is so much more to my September 11th.
I would eventually run for my life from the Woolworth Building.
There was terror and confusion and smoke and noise and the incomprehensible realization that the physical world I had taken for granted when I woke up that morning was disappearing around me.
But strangely, after twenty-five years, she remains the center of it for me.
The lady in the pink suit.
I never knew her name.
I don’t know who loved her.
I don’t know who waited for a telephone call that never came.
I don’t know whether she had children, parents, siblings, a husband, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, friends waiting to meet her for dinner.
I don’t even know whether my memory has preserved every detail correctly. Trauma is strange that way.
But I remember her.
And that is what I want younger people to understand about September 11th.
It wasn’t a movie.
It wasn’t two buildings collapsing in endlessly recycled television footage.
It wasn’t a campaign slogan.
It wasn’t a meme.
It wasn’t an excuse to hate Muslims.
It wasn’t an excuse to hate immigrants.
It wasn’t an argument about Democrats or Republicans.
It was people.
Nearly 3,000 individual human beings were killed that morning. Twenty-five years later, survivors, first responders and families are still living with its consequences.
Every one of those enormous historical numbers was a person.
Somebody’s father.
Somebody’s daughter.
Somebody’s best friend.
Somebody’s lady in the pink suit.
And that is why, twenty-five years later, I find myself increasingly furious at watching September 11th turned into political property.
I have no patience for anyone using that morning as permission to smear an entire religion, ethnicity or population.
I have no patience for mythology masquerading as memory.
I have no patience for people who weren’t standing where I was standing telling me whom September 11th gives them permission to hate.
And I have particular contempt for anyone who embellishes, distorts or invents his place in that day to make himself larger inside somebody else’s tragedy.
Which brings me to Donald Trump.
Today, while commemorating the 25th anniversary, Trump told a story about being near One Liberty Plaza in the aftermath of the attacks when there were fears that the building might collapse. He said two firefighters grabbed him beneath the arms, physically lifted him and began running with him to get him away from danger.
There really were fears that One Liberty Plaza might collapse. That part is documented.
What has not been independently established is Trump’s story that two firefighters picked him up and carried him to safety. Contemporary documentation establishes Trump near Ground Zero on September 13, and he has told versions of the firefighter story before, but current fact-checking has found no independent account corroborating the episode as he now describes it. His longstanding claims about bringing hundreds of his own workers to assist at Ground Zero have likewise never been independently substantiated.
And I take profound personal exception to that.
Because while Donald Trump has spent years making himself a character in the story of September 11th, I don’t have to insert myself into it.
I was fucking there.
I was in the Woolworth Building.
I watched the North Tower burn from my office window.
I watched paper pour from it like blood.
I watched human beings fall from it.
I watched a young woman in a pink business suit stand at the edge of that impossible height and make the most horrifying decision I have ever witnessed another human being make.
And then I ran for my life.
So I have very little tolerance for anyone embroidering himself into that day.
And I have none for turning the genuine heroism of firefighters into scenery for another story about Donald Trump.
There really were firefighters carrying people that day.
There really were firefighters running toward those buildings while everyone else was desperately trying to get away from them.
There really were firefighters who kissed their families goodbye that morning and never came home.
They don’t need to be extras in anybody’s mythology.
And don’t misunderstand my anger.
This is NOT politics to me.
I don’t object to a story about September 11th because the person telling it is a Republican.
I object when the history of September 11th is distorted because September 11th actually fucking happened.
Truth matters here.
Memory matters here.
The dead matter here.
The firefighters who actually performed acts of almost incomprehensible courage matter here.
And the woman in the pink suit matters here.
She never got to tell us her story.
She never got to spend the next twenty-five years making herself taller or braver or more important in the telling of it.
She got a few terrible seconds at a window.
And then she was gone.
So don’t fucking embellish this day for me.
Don’t appropriate its courage.
Don’t manufacture a starring role for yourself.
Don’t turn its dead into political props.
Don’t weaponize their murders against entire groups of people who had nothing to do with killing them.
And don’t expect those of us who actually stood beneath those towers and watched people die to politely treat bullshit about that morning as just another piece of political bullshit.
Some things are too sacred for that.
This is one of them.
And I need to say something else plainly because at 57 years old and twenty-five years removed from that morning, I am long past pretending that every disagreement deserves to be treated as merely a difference of political opinion.
There are disagreements about taxes, spending, regulation, foreign policy and a thousand other things on which reasonable people can argue.
This isn’t that.
For me, knowingly accepting falsehoods about September 11th, exploiting that day to demonize people because of their religion or ethnicity, or treating its dead and its heroes as props is not an ordinary political disagreement.
It is a question of character.
And I will judge character accordingly.
I don’t owe anyone neutrality about something I watched with my own eyes.
I don’t owe anyone a polite smile while the most traumatic day of my life is rewritten into somebody else’s political mythology.
I don’t owe anyone a debate about whether what I saw, what thousands of New Yorkers lived through and what nearly 3,000 people died in should be subordinate to loyalty to a politician.
It won’t be.
Not for me.
Not ever.
Because after all the politics, all the speeches, all the anniversaries, all the documentaries, all the arguments and all the fucking noise of the last quarter-century, when September 11th comes back to me, it still isn’t Donald Trump.
It isn’t George Bush.
It isn’t Osama bin Laden.
It isn’t red America or blue America.
It isn’t even, at first, the towers collapsing.
It’s her.
The lady in the pink suit.
The woman standing impossibly high above Lower Manhattan with death behind her and death beneath her, making a decision that I pray no human being I love will ever have to make.
For twenty-five years I have wondered who she was.
For twenty-five years I have hoped that wherever she is, she is at peace.
I have hoped that whoever loved her somehow found a way to survive what happened to her.
I have hoped her family went on to have lives filled with happiness and children and birthdays and Christmas mornings and ordinary Tuesdays.
And I have hoped that in some strange, unknowable way, it matters that a man she never met, standing in another building a quarter-century ago, saw her.
That he understood what she had been forced to do.
That he has carried her with him ever since.
I do.
I always will.
Twenty-five years later, the lady in the pink suit is still falling in my memory.
That is my credential.
I desperately wish it weren’t.
And that is what Never Forget means to me.