Beware the slow forgetting of Sept. 11 | Opinion
Maine educator remembers 9/11 25 years later, urging the next generation to keep the memory alive
A former Mount St. Charles Academy teacher in Portland, Maine, reflects on the day that forever altered his life and the nation, and warns that the personal stories of that morning are slipping into obscurity.
Ryan Bilodeau was a high‑school junior on September 11, 2001. He and his classmates watched the first attack unfold in real time. “I remember watching my father weep in front of the television, and praying the Rosary with my classmates,” Bilodeau told the Press Herald in a recent column. The principal of his school was on a trip to New York that day, near the World Trade Center, and word of the attack reached the school within minutes.
For many Maine residents, the day’s events were not just a news story but a living, breathing moment that entered classrooms and homes across the country. Bilodeau recalls the collective shock that rippled through his small community as the towers collapsed.
The story is especially personal for Bilodeau because one of his classmates, Amy Jarret, graduated from the same academy and was a flight attendant on United Airlines Flight 175. On the afternoon of September 11, Jarret was aboard the aircraft that struck the South Tower. She was only 28 when she died, and her story is one of the many individual tragedies that Bilodeau says are hard to capture in statistics alone.
“We’re seeing a generation that was born after the attacks now reaching adulthood,” Bilodeau wrote. “They are hearing about September 11 through old broadcasts and school lessons, and soon, they will have no witnesses of their own to ask where they were that day.” He observes that, like Pearl Harbor once did, the memory of 9/11 is beginning to recede into a distant past unless it is deliberately preserved.
Bilodeau points to the actions taken in the days after the attacks – people queuing to give blood, churches filling with mourners, flags raised on porches and storefronts – as tangible expressions of national grief that he feels must not be forgotten. “The blood donors, the crowded churches, the flags on porches and storefronts belong to September 11 too,” he said. “Those details will disappear from our collective memory unless we choose to preserve them.”
The column’s broader message is a call to the older generation to transmit these experiences to younger people. Bilodeau acknowledges that he cannot make those born years later feel the same pain he felt, but he can share the details of what the morning felt like: the sound of sirens, the sight of the towers, the quiet before the planes crashed.
“Twenty‑five years on, that is how memory survives,” Bilodeau wrote. “We have to tell those who were not there what that morning felt like, whom we lost, and what we witnessed in the days that followed.”
Maine’s educators and community leaders are already taking steps to keep the day’s stories alive. Several schools in the state have added memorial activities to their curriculum, and local churches are holding annual vigils that incorporate personal testimonies from those who lived through the attacks. Bilodeau hopes that these efforts will ensure that the next generation remembers not only the loss of life and the destruction of the towers, but also the resilience and shared humanity that emerged in the wake of tragedy.
