The fine line between memorializing and endlessly reliving a trauma
Three young adults grapple with the implications of losing a father on 9/11, a day they were too young to remember but can never escape.
Nina knows her father was friendly and kind. She also knows that he was driven and made his small town proud when he secured a job on Wall Street. She knows all this, but she does not know his voice.
The first time Nina Alameno heard her father’s voice was on a home video. “I obviously don’t know…what he sounded like,” she said while fidgeting with her ear and diverting her eyes to the ceiling.
A father’s voice is something most people cannot imagine not knowing. A voice that provides comfort, delivers dad jokes at the most inopportune of times, whispers good night before tucking you into bed, encourages you, consoles you — is there for you. Yet, that is something approximately 3,000 children lost the morning of September 11, 2001, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Nina’s father, Andrew Alameno, reported to his job at Cantor Fitzgerald, located on the 101st to the 105th floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. Two years old at the time, Nina was old enough to have loved her father but too young to have stored his voice in her memory.
Among those arriving at their jobs at Cantor Fitzgerald with Andrew that morning were Kevin McCarthy and William Micciulli. They also left behind children too young to fully remember them.
While Nina Alameno, Andrew McCarthy, and Sara Micciulli may not know their fathers’ voices, they will forever remember the event that claimed their lives — 9/11.
There is no doubt that their familiarity with 9/11 is a result of the infamy of the terrorist attack and the way it changed the nation’s trajectory, but it is also a product of the many commemorations and monuments memorializing and honoring those who perished, the frenzy of social media activity in the days leading up to the annual anniversary of the tragedy and the widespread media coverage of the terrorist attack. While this social media activity stems from a desire to honor the memory of 9/11’s victims, what if it does more harm than good by continuing to traumatize those who most need to make peace with the day?
Nina, Andrew, Sara, and the thousands of people who lost a loved one that day are inundated with posts about 9/11 on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media before every anniversary. Whether they depict the planes crashing into the Twin Towers or the heart-rending soundbites of victims’ last voicemails to their loved ones, these posts monopolize social media every September.
For the children who lost a parent to 9/11, the replay of these tragic events has added to their trauma. While many studies found that media exposure in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 fueled post-traumatic stress disorder, the link between social media and PTSD has not been covered as extensively. Despite the lack of literature, however, a link undeniably exists.
“I think some people that are removed from 9/11 will post some of those things that are more jarring,” says Dr. Heidi Horsley, a grief expert and adjunct professor at Columbia University, who has worked extensively with families of firefighters who died on 9/11. “They don’t realize the ramifications of doing that.”
Recently, victims’ children have been trying to spread this message. Andrew mentioned a meme circulating in his communities that attempts to draw an analogy between someone losing their parent to a car crash and someone losing their parent to 9/11. “If your friend died in a car crash, you wouldn’t go up to the family and show them the photo and say ‘I remember’ because it’s in bad taste,” Andrew heatedly explained.
Yet every year around the anniversary of 9/11, he becomes overwhelmed by the possibility of a social media post catching him off guard. As he scrolls through TikTok after a long day of work, the chance that a harmless puppy video is followed by a video of the planes hitting the Twin Towers is constantly lurking at the back of his mind. “At the end of the day, it’s bad,” he said.
“People post it because they have to,” Sara said matter-of-factly. The attacks on the Twin Towers were a major historical event that impacted everyone’s lives. Those who experienced a personal loss must live with that. “The problem with having someone die in 9/11 is that you have no control over when you’ll have reminders,” Dr. Horsley explained. “They don’t want to think about 9/11 when they’re buying oranges.” Yet, they are often forced to, especially in the days leading up to an anniversary.
While Nina, Sara, and Andrew appear to have accepted the unavoidability of the posts given the impact 9/11 had on the world, they would like the public to be sympathetic when posting on social media. Compassion and pause, they feel, should precede a decision to posting graphic content like final voice messages that have the potential of re-traumatizing victims’ families.
“Thank god one of those quotes isn’t from my mom and dad,” Nina said. She explained that the voice messages those in the tower left for their loved ones make her think of the panic and terror her father must have felt that day. “Knowing that my dad was in that… it’s a lot.”
Sara wants social media users to take into consideration the victims’ families before sharing these images. “Think about these family members who have to see it over and over again,” she said.
This social media activity around 9/11 stems from a need to belong, Dr. Karen Forbes, a psychologist who has studied the effects of 9/11 on children, explained. Our society thrives off a sense of belonging and, when a traumatic or highly public event occurs, people feel the need to be involved. In recent years, this urge has drawn people to social media as platforms are indiscriminative about what people can post. But the effects on the victims’ loved ones often go unnoticed, making them feel like the collective loss overshadows their personal loss.
Sara also attributes this disconnect to the way people remember 9/11 in today’s world. “It’s history to everyone now, which is kind of weird because it’s my life,” she says. Sara was ten months old when her father passed away and is one of the youngest people directly impacted by the event. She is constantly living this duality of not remembering the day, despite it playing such a pivotal role in her life.
“I have two little sisters who are going to learn about it as history,” she continued, drawing an analogy between how she learned about World War II when she was in the seventh grade.
The impact on this last generation directly affected by 9/11 is yet to be seen, Dr. Forbes explained. They will, however, feel a lot of pressure to shape the way future generations remember the day as they witness it, and their lost parents quickly become a part of history. A change they may have a hard time grappling with as they grow older and fewer people remember the tragedy.
Yet, society rarely thinks about how they want 9/11 to be remembered. Too often, the personal side of the day is lost. Perhaps it is hard to individually memorialize everyone because so many lives were lost nearly simultaneously. Perhaps because 9/11 shaped 21st-century American politics, it became a more critical national story versus a personal one.
Nina, Andrew, and Sara have accepted that they will never be able to claim the day as their own. In recognizing their inability to do so, however, they also recognize their ability to shape how the day is remembered — and ultimately, how their fathers are remembered.
Their fathers are what they want to focus on now.
While intrinsically linked to September 11th, their identities are so much more than the day they lost their lives. Andrew, Kevin, and William were all devoted to their families and were working to provide for their families. Nina’s father, Andrew, was the small-town boy who made it on Wall Street. Charming and gregarious, Andrew’s father, Kevin could hold a conversation with anyone. Sara’s father, William, a young executive with a bright future, was an avid NFL fan. Neither a social media post nor a history book chapter will ever be able to adequately capture who they were and what they meant to their families.
Their families want their memories to live on through them. They want to remember their deaths in peace. They want people to understand, with compassion, the layers of loss that occurred on 9/11. They want to take control of their own family stories.
“For 20 years, our story has kind of been told for us,” Sara says, “now we’re all old enough to say something about it.”
