What does it mean to be American? How 9/11 changed one Queens family.
Twenty years later, Inez Regan still sees the dust.
“Awful, awful, awful,” she says.
It coated the faces of the firefighters, the laces of the boots she helped untie, the eyelids she tried to rinse clean.
“We were inhaling that,” she says.
She wonders about the long-term effects of that dust, the lingering asbestos and memories. What’s happened in her own life, these past two decades, that she can attribute to those shards of cement and country?
And at this point, does it matter?
She glances at her father, now 102, sitting next to her on the sofa in his small Fresh Meadows, Queens, duplex, her childhood bedroom upstairs. Her daughter, Katelyn, age 39, is walking across the room to retrieve her 3-year-old, Cole, who would like a bagel.
Life goes on. It really does.
Still, Inez thinks sometimes about how each member of her family absorbed Sept. 11, 2001, how that day tied them together but also exposed generational fault lines.
It wasn’t that anything particularly remarkable happened to them – at least no more so than to other New Yorkers, other Americans. They weren’t central characters in the devastation or the heroism; none went to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq; none were compelled to study Islam or international relations and begin a career in anti-terrorism or diplomacy.
Still, like one of those rapid-evolution experiments, where scientists watch as microorganisms exposed to stimuli change before their eyes, Inez’s family has changed. And while it’s impossible to say how much is explicitly connected to Sept. 11, they all agree that day has shifted – in different ways, at different times – how they understand and interact with their country, institutions, the world.
For Inez’s father, James Lisa, a decorated World War II veteran, the attacks were a warning, and a reminder to heed the truths hard won by the Greatest Generation.
For Inez, who is 70 and spent her career as a nurse, 9/11 is still a painful, present shock to her baby-boomer understanding of American progress and exceptionalism.
Katelyn O’Prey, Inez’s daughter, sees in that crystal morning the launch of a millennial adulthood shaped by terror, a shift toward a worldview that is less trusting, but also, perhaps, more open.
Their lives, over the past 20 years, have been both remarkable and mundane: Sunday family dinners and special occasions at Anthony’s Italian restaurant, posing for pictures that will go on the family photo gallery on the stairwell, weddings and divorces and deaths and births, moments of bravery
Processing what it is to be “us”“I guess I’m going to war”Nobody came from the wreckageQuestioning “great nation” status