Twenty-five years ago this morning, 2,977 people went to work, boarded planes, or answered a call for help, and did not come home.
They were traders and dishwashers, secretaries and window washers, priests and flight attendants, firefighters and police officers and paramedics who climbed toward the fire while everyone else was running from it. They were parents. They were somebody’s whole world. Today, before anything else, I am remembering them.
I am also remembering the people they left behind, because that is where my part of this story begins.
By September 2001, Operation HOPE was nine years old. We were born in Los Angeles after the 1992 uprising, and I spent those nine years watching what a catastrophe does to a family long after the news trucks are gone. In the weeks after the attacks, I watched it happen again, on a scale I had never seen, to the widows and widowers of New York and Washington and Shanksville.
Picture a woman who has just buried her husband. She is being held up by her church, her neighbors, her sister who flew in and will not leave. And underneath all of that love, a clock is running. The mortgage is due on the first. His life insurance policy is somewhere in a filing cabinet on the 90th floor of a building that no longer exists. The restaurant he co-owned three blocks from Ground Zero has no customers and a payroll on Friday. Nobody in the relief system was assigned to her money, and grief does not pause for paperwork.
That is what I mean when I say the loss of September 11 did not end on September 11. For thousands of families, the same disaster kept unfolding at the kitchen table for years.
So we created HOPE Coalition America. I called it America’s economic Red Cross, because the country already had a Red Cross for the body and the spirit and needed one for the financial lives of the people who survived. It was not a departure from mourning. It was one of the ways we mourned, by refusing to let the families who had lost the most lose everything else too.
The promise we made that September has carried HOPE to New Orleans after Katrina, to Puerto Rico after Maria, to Maui after Lahaina, and this past year to my own hometown of Los Angeles after the fires. The name changed to HOPE Inside Disaster. The work did not. A coach sits next to a survivor, and together they find the documents, file the claim, build the budget, and hold on to the house.
Twenty-five years later, here is what I believe September 11 asked of all of us. To honor the dead by caring for the living. To understand that dignity in a crisis is not only safety and shelter, but a family’s ability to keep what it built. And to make sure that when the worst day comes, someone shows up for every part of it.
To the families of the 2,977: we have not forgotten. To the first responders who gave everything, and the many who are still paying for that day with their health: thank you. And to everyone who has stood with Operation HOPE across these 25 years: the promise still stands.
When disaster strikes, someone will show up for your financial life, too. That is how we remember.
