Lessons in anniversaries

Today marks 25 years since the attacks of 9/11. Most of you reading this remember your own experience of that Tuesday morning, where you were, how you learned, what you did next. Some of you may have more personal connections to this day, losses that still hurt; if so, I hope you find a way to be comforted today. It is jarring to realize that there are now among us physician colleagues who were in grade school or even younger in 2001, and even medical students rounding with us who had not yet even been born. (Someday, in say, March 2045, they can think back to the COVID-19 pandemic and feel similarly unmoored by the way time can collapse and expand.) Whatever our relationship to this day, we have all been shaped by it. And while it is easy to focus on the chaos, the fears, and uncertainty that followed that day, I find myself thinking instead about the people and the good I saw them do.

One of the enduring and more comforting lessons of 9/11 for me is that we do not get through difficult times alone. In the immediate aftermath, people ran toward one another. First responders entered buildings to help others get out. Neighbors checked on neighbors. People donated blood, volunteered, opened their homes, donated money to relief funds. They all started with a simple question, “What can I do?” They searched for ways to make something good in the world to balance out the bad, pooling our energy and our resources for positive change. Isn’t this the best case for working in health care at all? Our work, too, is built on people helping people, accomplishing more as a team than we could on our own. The good we do is the result of physicians, nurses, APPs, pharmacists, therapists, researchers, administrators, staff, and trainees bringing different skills and perspectives together. We are stronger because we are connected.

Community is not only something we discover in moments of crisis. It is something we build and sustain long before we need it. Community is the colleague who sees a peer struggling and asks how they are doing, how we can help. Community is the attending who spends a little more time thinking about how to phrase their feedback, so the trainee feels supported in their growth. Community is the team member who volunteers to pitch in on a problem they know they did not create. Community is the pan of brownies you stay up late to bake from scratch for the potluck because you know they taste just a little better than store-bought. In health care, we know that some of the hardest days are not marked by a single dramatic event. They are the accumulation of grief, exhaustion, uncertainty, and what feels like constant change. What carries us through those days is often the same thing that carried so many people through the aftermath of 9/11: knowing we are not alone.

There will always be challenges we cannot prevent and losses we cannot undo. But we can choose how we respond to them and we can have the courage to reach out in the darkness. When we care for one another, we create the kind of community that gives people strength not only to endure difficult times, but to find their way forward.

Photo for reflection
As the skies quieted across the country, many of us gathered in public places or around televisions, hungry for information, an explanation, some guidance. The very next year, the Tribute in Light art installation was a powerful statement of remembrance and of endurance. Dozens of individual spotlights clustered extend their beams all the way into the skies, far past the reach of the buildings they are meant to represent. Twenty-five years later, maybe the lesson worth carrying forward is not simply to remember what was lost, but to remember what we gave one another: courage, compassion, service, a willingness to make the good outweigh the bad. I hope that whatever meaning this day holds for you, that you can take a second and treasure the communities around you, the ones you invest in and the ones that sustain you. Standing side by side with people willing to face hardships with us makes our individual lights brighter.