Remembering the Day After 9/11: A Personal Reflection

It’s hard to believe that so much time has passed since that fateful day—September 11, 2001. I can still recall it vividly, as if it happened just yesterday. On the morning of 9/11, I was at a KPMG golf tournament in Kanata, Ontario. It was a perfect, crisp fall day, and everyone was in high spirits, focused on the game, until news started trickling through the course: a plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. At first, there was confusion. People weren’t sure what to make of it. But as the gravity of the situation became clearer, golfers began abandoning their games, leaving golf carts scattered in the parking lot as they rushed to their cars, eager to get home and understand what was happening.

I managed to make it back to my office in the west end of Ottawa, where my colleagues and I huddled around a small TV in the boardroom. We were glued to the screen, trying to make sense of the chaos unfolding before our eyes. Then, as we watched in horror, the second plane hit the South Tower. That’s when we knew this was no accident. The world as we knew it was changing before our eyes.

But it wasn’t until the next day that the full weight of the tragedy sank in. Waking up that morning, it felt like a bad dream. But the nightmare was real. It was the day after 9/11 that I realized the world had fundamentally shifted. The sense of safety and normalcy we had taken for granted was gone, replaced with an overwhelming sense of uncertainty and grief. America had changed. The world had changed.

In the following days, I was called to our data center in Jersey City, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. It was a surreal experience. Manhattan, typically bustling with life, was eerily quiet—a ghost town. The iconic skyline, once dominated by the Twin Towers, now felt incomplete, as if the soul of the city had been ripped away. The air was thick with grief, dust, and a strange silence, broken only by the occasional siren or the roar of military jets overhead. It was a time of deep sorrow and reflection for everyone.

I’ll never forget those six days in Jersey City, standing along the riverbank, looking out at the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. It was impossible to comprehend the loss, the senseless destruction. The world was grieving, not just for the nearly 3,000 lives lost, but for a collective sense of security that had been shattered.

It’s been over two decades now, but the memories of that time remain with me. The events of 9/11 left an indelible mark on all of us, a moment in history where we were forced to confront the fragility of life and the resilience of the human spirit.

God bless all those we lost that day, and may we never forget the lessons learned. The world has changed, but in remembering, we honor the strength, courage, and unity that emerged from the ashes of that terrible day.