# data[].attributes.body
Jean Semple spends her free time at the Sudbury Senior Center. She is the head of a low vision group, which helps her bring purpose to her life.

# data[].attributes.body
Jean is becoming a grandmother to 6 beautiful children! Jamie (pictured on the left) is Jeans daughter in law who's expecting. Jean remembers this day like yesterday, She feels so blessed to have met so many of her precious grandchildren.

# data[].attributes.body
Jean lives a happy life with family and friends. She has achieved so many milestones: graduating college, becoming a nurse, getting married, having three children, opening her own company, and much more. She contributes her success to prioritizing her happiness. She never went to bed upset, helped others before herself, eat a chocolate bar every night after dinner, and spoke up for what she believed in. Being true to yourself will help you receive the right people and opportunities for YOUR path!

# data[].attributes.headline
How Culture has changed over her lifetime!

# data[].attributes.subject
How Culture has changed over her lifetime!

# data[].attributes.body
Jean feels culture has changed in amazing ways, over the course of her life! She is so proud of our advancements in equality regarding race, sexuality, gender, etc.

She doesn't love how much we prioritize technology, as it eliminates human interaction.

Overall, She is so excited for the future of our society!

# data[].attributes.body
This photo was taken at their son, Scott's 50th Birthday Party! They're thankful for their health and life together.

# data[].attributes.body
Thanksgiving 2022, Jean cooked dinner for 20+ people! She is 100% Italian and grew up in a cooking household. Jean loves to cook for her loved ones, it's how she expresses her love.

# data[].attributes.headline
Trying her first Acai Bowl with her granddaughter!

# data[].attributes.subject
Trying her first Acai Bowl with her granddaughter!

# data[].attributes.body
Jean has learned how to make smoothies, which lead her to try an acai bowl! Jean is legally blind due to an eye disease, which makes trying new things difficult. She's so proud of expanding her horizons!

# data[].attributes.body
Jean is proud of her Catholic Beliefs, just like her granddaughter! She had an amazing day celebrating the confirmation and spending quality time with her son's family in Connecticut! She calls her granddaughters her, "soulmates:)"

# data[].attributes.headline
Played at her wedding, She can envision her friends and family dancing!

# data[].attributes.subject
Played at her wedding, She can envision her friends and family dancing!

# data[].attributes.body
On September 11th, Jean was at the senior center, attending pool yoga. The class ended abruptly, which caused concern as that had never happened before. All the ladies headed to the locker room and noticed they all had missed calls from their children. Jean soon realized something was wrong. She listens to a voicemail from her husband, stating the twin towers had collapsed and Laura was there for a meeting. Laura is Jeans oldest daughter, who has 3 young boys. Time felt as if it wasn't moving, Jean couldn't imagine loosing her daughter. 4 hours had passed, They received a call from the hospital. Laura was alive and had suffered multiple injuries. Today, Laura is the top relator in her Boston Suburb and is healthier than she was before her injuries.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Todd Heisler for The New York Times

Listen to This Article

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
In his mind, Michael Regan should have been down there. He should have had the guts.

A longtime New York City employee who became first deputy fire commissioner after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Regan coordinated scores of funerals and memorial services and helped hundreds of shattered families. Still, he could not shake the guilt. He should have been there, down at the World Trade Center.

After a couple of months, Mr. Regan finally shared his remorse with a stunned Fire Department colleague, who told him that he had been there. He had helped transport the bodies of the first deputy fire commissioner, Bill Feehan, and the chief of department, Peter Ganci, to the morgue on First Avenue.

Don't you remember?

Looking back, Mr. Regan said his mental block must have been a way to cope with the instant loss of thousands, including many close friends. "It was a safety mechanism," he said. "I saw horrible things that day, and I didn't want to think about those things."

Twenty years later, the command to "Never Forget" retains its power, jolting us into the past whenever we see it on a hat or flag or the back of a passing car on the Belt Parkway. For all its slogan-like simplicity, these twinned words seem freighted with the complexities of guilt, obligation and even presumption - as if we could ever forget.

But now that an entire generation has been born since the day, versions of the question posed to Mr. Regan might be asked of all of us who lived it in some way. Two planes hijacked by Al Qaeda piercing the north and south towers of the World Trade Center. A third slamming into the Pentagon in Arlington, Va. A fourth crashing in an open field outside Shanksville, Pa. All in less than 90 minutes.

What, exactly, do you remember? What stories do you tell when a casual conversation morphs into a therapy session? What stories do you keep to yourself? And what instantly transports you back to that deceptively sunny Tuesday morning?

For Nikki Stern, a writer, it might be the waft of cigar smoke. Her husband, Jim Potorti, a vice president at Marsh & McLennan who worked on the 96th floor of the north tower, enjoyed the occasional cigar. Or it might be the sight of a bicycle. Just a bicycle. Jim used to cycle. ...

"I compartmentalize," Ms. Stern said. "But there's a permanent leak in the compartment."

For James Luongo, a former deputy chief of the New York Police Department, it's driving past the now-closed Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. He spent nearly a year on that mound, supervising a pop-up base camp where 1.8 million tons of Trade Center debris were sifted for human remains and personal effects.

The problem is: Mr. Luongo lives on Staten Island.

"You've got to put it where it needs to be," he said of the memories. "And not open the door more than you have to."

Never Forget.

"When I hear 'Never Forget' for 9/11, my next question is: 'Never forget what?'" said Charles B. Stone, an associate professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Never forget the international dynamics that set the stage? The homeland insecurities that followed, including the harassment of American citizens simply because they were Muslim? The months of seemingly nonstop funerals? The two decades of war and bloodshed?

"Probably the closest answer is: Never forget that it occurred," Mr. Stone said. "But it's the little details that will be forgotten."

I remember.
The stillness as another body was pulled from the rubble and carted away to salutes and construction helmets held over hearts. The hum of the refrigerated trucks outside the morgue. The acrid smell of loss drifting uptown through the newsroom's open windows. The landfill. The funerals. The dust.

Image

"It's the little details that will be forgotten," said Charles B. Stone, an associate professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Credit... Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

Of course, the call to Never Forget can also be interpreted as another honorable attempt to preserve some faint sense of the day's many emotions. Honorable, but perhaps futile against the ceaseless rub of the passing years, the vagaries of memory.

In the first days after the Sept. 11 attacks, a team of scholars around the country set out to capture the moment's "flashbulb" memories: the vivid, enduring mental snapshots formed at the instant of historical import, such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the assassination of John F. Kennedy. They asked more than 3,000 people a few questions, including: Where were you when you learned about the terrorist attacks?

In New York, graduate students working on the study set up tables and handed out surveys at Union Square and Washington Square, where thousands had gathered in the days and weeks after the attacks just to be with one another, moments of communal mourning also now slipping from memory.

A year later, the researchers asked the same questions of many of the same people, only to find that 40 percent of the memories had changed. A man now saying that he was in the office when he learned of the attacks might previously have said that he had been on a train.

These altered recollections were consistent with similar studies done in connection with other historical events, according to Elizabeth A. Phelps, a professor of neuroscience at Harvard University who worked on the 9/11 memory study. What distinguished the memories of Sept. 11, when compared with ordinary autobiographical memories, was the extreme confidence that people had developed in their altered remembrances, which by the first anniversary had begun to concretize.

"You have your story and you're sticking to it," Dr. Phelps said.

William Hirst, a professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research, who also worked on the study, agreed. "I think what happens is they develop a narrative about their flashbulb memory," he said. "It becomes their story."

Dr. Hirst wonders whether the changes in memory are somehow linked to a sense of identity. After all, what would it say about you as a New Yorker - as an American - if you didn't know how you first heard about the Sept. 11 attacks? Aligning your personal narrative with a consequential moment in history may be a way of asserting that you are a part of the affected community, that you belong.

Inevitably, someday there will be no one alive with a personal narrative of Sept. 11. Inevitably, the emotional impact of the day will fade a little bit, and then a little bit more, as time transforms a visceral lived experience into a dry history lesson. This transformation has already begun; ask any high school history teacher.

But for now, for many, Sept. 11 remains a lived experience. We have our stories - our possibly altered memories - to share, or not to share, on the anniversary or any day of the year.

We might tell our stories to hold back the inevitable erasure of time. We might tell them to help us process the moment, or to explain why we grow quiet whenever we hear Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising."

Then again, we might keep our stories locked in some leaky compartment, for fear of being perceived as another 9/11 narcissist, the hero of our own narrative. Or maybe we keep them to ourselves out of simple reverence.

The names of the dead at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Lower Manhattan. Credit... Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Mr. Regan, the man who momentarily forgot, is now 64 and an executive with J.P. Morgan Chase. He has his memories, his stories. Some are funny, in that dark Irish way of coping. Some are so sobering that silence is the only response.

He avoids the anniversaries, the annual recitation of the names of the dead, and all the documentaries and books and essays the day continues to inspire. He will never visit the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, he said. "I don't need to go back."

Mr. Luongo, now 63, retired in March after 40 years with the N.Y.P.D., a career distinguished in part by those many months on the Staten Island landfill. More than 4,200 human remains were recovered, as well as nearly 60,000 personal items, including photographs and identification cards.

What he supervised was a village built on tragedy and aglow at night, with office trailers, a decontamination center, a mess hall, and conveyor belts waiting to receive the debris barged from Lower Manhattan. Looming stacks of crushed vehicles, including police cars and fire engines, arranged in neat, horrific rows.

All gone, like Brigadoon. Was it even real? Or is this, too, a trick of memory?

"I remember," Mr. Luongo said. "So you get up in the morning, light a candle, say a prayer - and move on."

Ms. Stern, who went on to write two nonfiction books and four novels, also remembers. How could she not?

Shopping for eggs in a SuperFresh market near her home in Princeton, N.J., planning to make chocolate chip cookies for her husband - "I made the best ones in the world" - when someone shouted something like: The World Trade Center has been hit!

Being notified six months later that a quarter-size piece of Jim had been identified. Writing and writing and writing every night through her grief, more than 150,000 words that no one else will ever see.

Ms. Stern has spent the last 20 years trying to get past the "uniquely suffering kind of thing," as she puts it, and work toward building something constructive. Her involvement with the nonprofit peace-building organization Search for Common Ground is another form of remembering.

"I don't want anyone to go through this," Ms. Stern said. "But I also don't want to go through life saying, 'You can't understand what I went through.' What's the point? Why should they?"

The smell of a cigar. A bicycle. A drive on the Staten Island Expressway. The anniversary.

The dust.

I remember camping out with the National Guard in Battery Park several days after the terrorist attacks. I remember wearing a construction helmet, carrying a clipboard and walking around as if I belonged at the restricted World Trade Center site, then known as "the Pile" and as much a burial ground as a crime scene.

I remember the messages of grief, anger and faint hope scrawled in the dust that had settled on the surrounding buildings. Scrawled with the tips of fingers. I remember being determined to chronicle these messages before the power washers came.

"The Towers Will Rise Again"

"Vernon Cherry Call Home"

"God Be With You Dana - Love, Mom"

I remember not wanting to think too hard about what comprised the dust, and not thinking at all about how harmful the dust might be for rescue and recovery workers to inhale.

I remember the dust being the color of vanilla, although my notes say it was gray. But I am certain of this: The dust was everywhere. The world was covered in it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Todd Heisler for The New York Times To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android . In his mind, Michael Regan should have been down there. He should have had the guts.

# data[].attributes.body
Jean doesn't mind how society has made her feel regarding aging. She spends lots of time with her friends and family, who don't treat her differently because of her age. She gets frustrated at times because she cannot drive due to her eyesight. Ubers can be difficult to order and she doesn't want to bother her children. Her daughter, Laura, Goes to her mom's house every day on her lunch break. She makes a list of everything Jean needs and its delivered the day from Amazon. The small acts of giving make a big difference in jeans life. She doesn't feel "old" but just that she has to ask for help sometimes.