13-year-old Monica, feeling a bit feverish, decides to skip school on September 11, 2001. She decides to visit her father at his company's meeting on the 51st floor of the North Tower. Just as she sets foot on the stairwell, however, disaster strike...
On the morning of Wednesday, September 12, 2001, my mother brought me to the emergency room. My left wrist still hurt badly from the fall down the stairs the day before, and it was bent upwards at an odd angle. The doctors there took an X-ray image of my aching, swollen wrist.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
They told me that my radius, or the forearm bone that is thicker and shorter, had been broken. Luckily, I didn't need metal plates surgically inserted or anything of the sort. Only a cast that immobilized my arm for six weeks. My mom was the first to sign it. She wrote: From Momma-and hopefully Pops!
June 2, 2006 was the day of my high school graduation. I was so excited, standing there in my gown and cap, ready to begin college the following August. My four best friends stood beside me. We were all holding our diplomas, smiling for the flashing cameras, happy to have finally made it.
Suddenly, my mother's phone rang loudly, disrupting all the chatting and picture-taking.
"Hello, Isabella Nowland, and you are? Oh, Aspen and Darren! How nice to talk to you two wonderful people again. You have some news about where Paul is? What about—oh, is it not good?"
At this point, my mother stood up and had a complete fit. Crying, screaming, the works. She didn't seem to care that people were staring, but I did. Everyone knew she was my mother, so it was a bit embarrassing.
I ran up to her and shouted, "Mother, listen to me! Stop screaming, everyone is looking at us! What's wrong?"
She ignored me and continued shouting into the phone. "He can't be dead! He just can't! I am at our daughter's senior graduation literally right now! Can we at least bury what's left of him?"
I flinched at those words, realizing my father had been found dead. Can we at least bury what's left of him sounded like something a murderer would say. I wondered what actually was left of my Pops.
"He died in the buildings he loved, at least," Mother was a little calmer now. "The Twin Towers. He fell with the North Tower. My daughter—I mean, our daughter told me he said he would die with his tower."
Everyone in the room was now gasping and whispering pitiful things about me. "That poor girl's father must have died on 9/11! How awful!"
After a bit more time talking to the officers on the phone, my mother hung up. Tears were running down her pretty face. I didn't notice until then, but tears were also slowly rolling down mine, the face that looked like Pop's.
"Come on, Monica," she announced, pulling me out the door by the arm as I tripped and nearly fell trying to keep up with her. "We have to go to the NYPD station right away. Your father was finally found in the rubble, and I am afraid he isn't alive."
June 9, 2006 was the second-worst day of my life: the day of my father's funeral. No one could bear to look at what little remained of Pops, so the casket lid was kept closed. Around a hundred people came, including my dad's boss, who was not in the North Tower on the day of the attacks. We all dressed in black, despite the fact that it was June and therefore too hot to wear black.
I cried the whole service. I couldn't stop for a second.
In July of that same year, I learned I had been accepted into Columbia University, a private Ivy League college. I started my college education in August.
I bought my first apartment and moved into it on August 28, 2010.
On September 11, 2011, the 9/11 Memorial Pools opened. I found my father's name on panel N-67 of the North Pool. I put a photo of my father and I in addition to some flowers on the name PAULNOWLAND. I knelt by it and cried for hours until the memorial closed for the night.
It had been ten years.
I finally graduated from Columbia University on May 28, 2014, with a doctorate in business and finance. I had attended classes at the school for seven and a half years to earn the degree.
On November 1, 2014, I received the news that I had been hired by Condé Nast, a publishing company.
I was overjoyed when I found out I'd be working on the 43rd floor of the Freedom Tower, the new One World Trade Center. I would be starting work the day of her completion, which was set to be November 3, 2014.
Now, I have been working there for almost five years. I enjoy my job, my boss, and my colleagues. I earn enough money to live a stable and healthy life, and I couldn't be happier to still be living in Manhattan today.
Of course, I'm not on my own at all.
My name is Dr. Monica O'Reilly. I am happily married to a Missourian man I met on my second trip to St. Louis in 2008. Together, my husband and I have a two-year-old daughter named Ellie and an infant son named Paul, who we agreed to name after Pops. I will definitely never forget what happened on September 11, 2001. I will always remember Pops and the way he would laugh when I told him his own jokes, or the way he'd beg to push me on the swing even when I grew out of going to the neighborhood playground. Darren and Aspen Binnington are still the best NYPD officers ever, even while busy taking care of their 10-year-old twin daughters, America and Liberty. The two cops are 39 years old and still arresting criminals and saving people from disaster areas every single day!
Bostonian photographer Leonard Clay is still my friend. His photo of Aspen and Darren hugging me like they were my mother and father on 9/11 has been shared all over the world under the name "A Light in Darkness." The Binnington twins were born six years after 9/11, but they have a chance to really see what it was like when they looked at the photo of their future parents embracing me, covered in dust.
