Often, when we want to express a powerful emotion, we turn to roses. We fall in love; we send a dozen red roses. We express joy at birth – roses. Love and compassion after a passing – roses. Happy, joyous, sad, or profound – roses express all those emotions that so often cannot be put into words.
This week, there will be many moments to reflect on the tragedy of 9/11. It has been 24 years since that unimaginable Tuesday morning. More than a generation later, we will also reflect on the rebirth of the World Trade Center campus. We work alongside people who witnessed the tragedy and the rebirth, and now with people who were not even born on September 11, 2001.
As years pass, we think we are somehow supposed to be able to make sense of what happened, how we responded to it, and, also, understand where we are moving toward as that fateful day fades with memory.
The answers are elusive. That’s where the roses come in. They speak for us. And they speak for those who are no longer with us.
These cut flowers that have but precious little time to be both fragrant and beautiful are cherished, as we, who have grown older over these past twenty-four years, have learned to cherish the people we love and the people who matter in our lives.
They are cut roses. Beautiful. Sometimes, if touched the wrong way, painful, and like real roses, with us for a precious little bit of time.
There is a song written for a French film by the composer Michel Legrand. The lyrics were later rewritten in English by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the lyrics writing team known for songs like “The Way We Were.” But this song I am thinking of is called, “You Must Believe in Spring.” The great Tony Bennet recorded it, and I encourage you to give it a listen.
Part of a verse reads: “Beneath the deepest snows, the secret of a rose is merely that it knows you must believe in spring.”
That lyric speaks to us today and the Port Authority tradition of placing roses at the names of colleagues who perished on September 11, 2001, and during the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
For the past four years, we, this family called the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, leave roses next to the names of the 84 people the Port Authority lost on 9/11, and in the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This year’s Rose Ceremony was held on September 8th.
Each person attending the annual Rose Ceremony is handed a rose with the name of a person who perished during one of those tragic events. We walk to that person’s name etched in the bronze surrounding the pools, framing the shape of the original North and South towers. We place a rose at that name, and each year, I encourage all those participating to say that name aloud.
We say their names – the 84 we lost. We give them life as we reconnect their name to the person who lived that name.
We also leave roses at The Glade that marks the deaths of the valiant first responders, and the heroes who worked on The Pile, who died or became sick in the subsequent years following 9/11, and we leave roses in the Memorial Garden next to the St. Nicholas Greek Church and National Shrine, that gives honor to our Port Authority heroes who have succumbed to those same horrible illnesses.
At the Port Authority, we come together to celebrate, to grieve, to draw strength from one another, and, equally important, to draw strength from those who have come before us. We, the 8,000-strong people of the Port Authority today, are uplifted by the memories of the thousands who have served this agency for 104 years.
We do not have answers as to how something so horrific could have occurred. We will never have adequate words to console the families and friends of those lost on 9/11, in 1993, and over the subsequent years following the recovery effort at Ground Zero.
But we have roses that speak not with words, but with their precious beauty. They remind us of what is unique about each one of us – those who are lost and those who are left to move forward. In the days and months following those tragedies, the beauty of a rose seemed out of reach. They were cold, dark times. But the secret of the rose is that it knows to believe in spring, to a time of rebirth.
After the ceremony on Monday, September 8th, the names etched into the bronze that surround the footprints of the North and South towers, literally blossomed with the colors of the roses left behind.
The message is simple as we mourn, reflect, and move forward: You must believe in spring.
Kevin J. O’Toole is the Chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
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