These are poignant days at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey as the 22nd anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks approaches. While the public is aware of the televised ceremony held on the World Trade Center campus each year on the anniversary of the attacks, the Port Authority holds a small, private Rose Service ceremony for employees and retirees to honor the 84 Port Authority employees killed on 9/11, the individuals who died in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and the many who’ve been sickened or have died from illnesses linked to working the 9/11 recovery effort.
That Rose Service was held this morning. It is a mostly quiet event. Attendees are given the name of an individual who died on 9/11 or in the 1993 bombing and they place a rose at that person’s inscribed name in the bronze panels that frame the two voids of the Twin Towers’ footprints.
Roses are also laid in the small memorial garden adjacent to St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine. That garden is dedicated to the Port Authority employees who either died on 9/11 or from subsequent illness related to the recovery. These heroes are too often overlooked, and their numbers continue to grow.
Most summer days, the 9/11 Memorial is crowded with visitors, but in the early morning the site is quiet. It is a place where the people of the Port Authority – many who worked in the North Tower on 9/11 or on February 26, 1993 – can remember lost friends and colleagues.
It is a deeply personal experience. The enormity of 9/11 is made personal and with it, the individuals lost become more than names in bronze. They become once again the vital individuals they once were.
I have read that the tradition of laying flowers at gravesite dates back thousands of years. The Romans placed flowers at the graves of fallen soldiers believing that if the flowers took root, the deceased would find peace. It is a beautiful thought.
Placing a rose at a name along the 9/11 Memorial or in the small Port Authority memorial garden also brings peace to us. It is a connection between the living and the dead, a connection that in our time of so much noise and distractions is so important,
The Rose Ceremony is nondenominational, but it brings to mind an old hymn often sung at Christmas: “Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming.” Many of you know it, I am sure. There are three lines – separated from any religious theme – that speak to all of us:
It came, a flower bright,
Amid the cold of winter,
When half-gone was the night.
We are not amid the cold of winter, in a literal sense. But figuratively, we too often are regardless of whether it is late summer or winter. The fragility of the freshly cut roses and the burst of color against the 9/11 Memorial’s bronze panels and on the manicured earth of the memorial garden are reminders of both the temporary existence we have and of the blaze of colors each of us paint during our lives.
The flowers make those individuals lost to tragedies blaze with the colors of life once again. I have noted before that by saying someone’s name, we remember them, and that it is said that as long as someone remembers someone, they’re still live.
It is a power all of us hold inside – to give life to those we have lost. The flowers bring them peace. The flowers bring us peace.
In the coming days, the enormity of September 11, 2001, will be much discussed. The reading of all the names of the dead can be almost too much to process. So, I encourage all you, in the weeks and months ahead to visit the 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center, or visit a 9/11 memorial near your hometown, bring a rose, and remember just one individual whether it is someone you knew personally, or place it at a random name inscribed in bronze or stone and imagine how magnificent that person must have been.
There is power in that rose.
And there is peace.
Kevin J. O’Toole is the Chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
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