Like all Americans, I will never forget where I was and what I was doing on the morning of September 11, 2001. We were living about 25 miles outside of Philadelphia, and my husband worked in the city. The city issued a mandatory evacuation order, but shut down all public transportation. My husband and many of his colleagues had to walk home, or at least walk until I could pick him up on the road. Of the many images scarred in my mind from that day, one is of the flood of people walking towards me as I carefully drove towards the city. Like most Americans, we sat and watched the news for the rest of the day and late into the night. We called our families. We cried. We stared in disbelief at live newscasts with pictures and videos that didn’t look like something that could happen in the United States. We received a phone call that a college friend’s fiancé had not yet been heard from. And we wondered, “What was life going to be like for our child?”

Like many of my friends, I was pregnant on September 11, 2001.

And like many of my friends, I just sent that child off to college. In a pandemic. In the midst of a different type of fear, with a different uncertainty for the future.

When the pandemic first hit, there were posts about the Class of 2020 being born in the aftermath of 9/11, and graduating during a pandemic. But for some reason, this was more poignant to me today: on September 11th. We launched them into the world during the unrest of 9/11, and we have re-launched them into the world during even more unrest. We could protect them 19 years ago; we can not protect them now.

But they are ready. We raised them to be ready. Because they were born when they were, we raised them the way we did – with all the love and fierceness and bold determination it took to find the goodness in a world that seemed so dark. They were our light. They are still our light. Now it is their turn to share their light with a world that is still dark. But it will be a better, brighter world with them launched in it.