On Being a 9/11 Kid

By Cat Brennan

Thursday, September 10, 2026

 

Across the country, there are thousands of Americans who remember little if anything from the worst day of their lives. I’m among these young adults who grew up shaped by a day, and a person, we cannot remember.

 

I lost my father, Tom Brennan, in the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. I was 1.

 

I’ve gone through the struggles that typically come with losing a parent. But I’m luckier than most. My father’s death was a fact of life growing up, rather than a drastic change amid an otherwise normal childhood. My mother raised my brother and me as normally and openly as possible. We were encouraged to ask questions about our dad and have maintained an incredibly close relationship with his family. We are actively involved in a memorial foundation in his memory, a scholarship fund for students at Boston College, his alma mater. I often heard stories of older children of 9/11 victims, who handled the loss with various self-destructive behaviors, and thought, “I am so lucky.”

 

Yet this luck also prevented the loss from feeling mine. People who were old enough to remember that day experienced it more viscerally than I did, and some part of me has always let that invalidate my own grief.

 

For most of my life, and often still to this day, I’ve kept my father’s death and 9/11 as two separate things. One personal, one historical. This separation helped me get through school lessons and anniversaries. We younger 9/11 kids had to grow up learning about the attacks in school, hearing explicit details of the attacks before we could really understand them for ourselves.

 

In the first grade, I made my teacher sob because I drew an innocent picture of the towers, not knowing her husband had survived the attacks. My drawing showed the towers on fire, but I was too young to understand the gravity of it at the time.

 

In the fourth grade, I wrote a poem, “I Am Not Grateful He Is Dead,” about one of my father’s last days alive, when he danced in the car to the Grateful Dead with my mother and me. From what I recall, it was a happy story until the last line: “That was their last day together.” I remember making all my friends cry, and my poor mother, who hadn’t heard the poem before parent presentations. I honestly can’t help but laugh a little thinking about how dark it was, yet how completely normal it felt to me. But I still felt proud to write about my experience and found a bit of solace in this act of reflection, even at 8 years old.

 

As I grew up and began to understand 9/11 more, though, I began to distance myself from it in school. During the inevitable history lesson on 9/11 each year, I would read about my father’s death in a textbook as I tried to avoid looking at the corresponding photos of the planes hitting the towers (a literal photo of his murder, to be blunt). I remember feeling my classmates steal glances at me as my teachers walked through the lesson, waiting to see how I’d react. And of course they did. How many of my classmates had a parent’s death detailed and photographed in their textbook?

 

This attention, coupled with the fact that everyone already knew the day my father died, made me feel exposed in a way most middle schoolers would do anything to avoid. Growing up, I remember walking into school on the anniversary, feeling as if I had something to prove to my classmates, though I’m not sure what. But every year, as I walked through the front doors, I felt my face get hot as every single student and teacher turned to stare at me in unison like something out of a movie.

 

Then there is everything that happens outside of the classroom. There are dozens of Reddit threads, Instagram posts, and Facebook pages created by strangers retelling the story of my father’s death. They include a plethora of personal details about his favorite songs, his hobbies, and even his last conversation with my mom. These posts have thousands of likes and comments from people he never met, some of them even remarking on how much I look like my father in a baby photo, which is oddly touching.

 

It’s hard not to feel a bit violated by this well-meaning interest, and even a bit protective over my own grief. But I also feel a sense of responsibility to wear the “9/11 kid” badge with honor and honesty—to show people you can turn tragedy into a source of good. Whether that’s through my dad’s memorial foundation, serving as a mentor for Tuesday’s Promise (a foundation that offers support to families who have been affected by loss related to 9/11 or post-9/11 military service, and that has been an incredible resource for my family), or even being the go-to grief girl whenever someone in my life loses someone.

 

More often than not, I have found people want to feel close to a tragedy as profound as 9/11. It makes them feel more human, more connected to something bigger than themselves.

 

For many people I know, I happen to be that connection. I’ve likely come up at more dinner table discussions than I’ll ever know, simply for being a 9/11 kid. It usually starts the same way. Someone learns I’m a 9/11 kid, and it prompts them to tell their own story, the one they seem to have been waiting to tell: “My dad was supposed to be in the towers that day but missed his train,” “my family friend had a doctor’s appointment,” and so on.

 

I have never known how to respond to this: “Good for them”? “My dad was just dropping off paperwork and on his way out to meet his pregnant wife at her OB-GYN checkup”? “I don’t remember that day, so I’m not sure if I can relate to your memory of it”? There’s no version of a conversation that ends somewhere comforting for either of us.

 

Some part of me was even jealous of those who had their own memory of the day, as if witnessing the day in all of its horror authenticated their grief in a way mine could never be. Although I am blessed not to have experienced the trauma of 9/11 in real time, it sometimes has been infuriating that, despite my efforts, I cannot form an in-depth emotional connection to the day. As much as I know that distance is probably for the best, it has still made me feel lucky, guilty, and, to be honest, even a bit angry.

 

I’ve always felt this conflict the most at the memorial site. Now, when my brother and I visit, we call each other to joke about the tourists sitting on our dead dad’s name, or buy each other something dumb from the gift shop. Underneath the humor, though, I still feel a familiar twang of something—protectiveness, guilt, grief; I am not totally sure. I almost feel a sense of responsibility to scream to everyone around me, “Hey, this actually happened! I know it’s a memorial. I know it doesn’t feel personal to you in the way that other tragedies don’t feel personal to me. But this one is different. This one is mine!”

 

And maybe part of me is even trying to remind myself of that. Except this one isn’t only mine.

 

My family jokes that our favorite day of the year is September 12, when we can finally exhale and move beyond the public pressure of the anniversary. Like clockwork, toward the end of August, I start feeling a sense of heaviness and fog. My body knows what is coming when the calendar finally turns to September before my mind does. September 12 means we get a full year until we have to deal with the media coverage, strangers’ inquiries, and just the overall forced reckoning with grief rather than dealing with it on our own terms.

 

But as strange and complicated as it is to share my personal grief with the world, I prefer it to grieving alone. Every year, without fail, people I haven’t heard from in months, or even years, reach out on the anniversary, just to check in, just to say they’re thinking of me.

 

Every year I hear a new story about my dad from someone reflecting on the anniversary of 9/11. Some years it’s a song they remember him playing nonstop, or a ridiculous college story they feared sharing with me before I was old enough to understand.

 

I doubt this would happen if my father had died any other way. I prefer opening my phone to constant texts, social media posts, news articles, and #NeverForgets than to nothing at all. It is nice knowing the rest of the world is remembering, too.

 

It’s strange to think I actually may feel more connected to my father because he died in a national tragedy rather than in another way. The collective remembrance and reflection of the day means I am never mourning alone. For us 9/11 kids, being too young to remember that day does not mean losing ownership of our grief, but rather sharing and remembering it together.