Reflection / Sean Gallagher

Fear turns to triumph in the heart of a newly expectant father on 9/11

The late spring and early summer of 2001 filled my heart and mind with beautiful memories to last a lifetime.

My wife Cindy and I exchanged our wedding vows on June 9, 2001. After a wonderful honeymoon trip in Florida, we returned to our home in Bartholomew County and began our wedded life that, while it had its inevitable hiccups, overall exceeded in happiness what I had imagined it could be in the time leading up to our wedding day.

By Sept. 10, the blessings of our early married life reached even higher as we became convinced that we were expecting our first child.

I took all of this to the prayers of thanks that I offered to God when I went to 8:30 Mass on the morning of September 11 at St. Joseph Church in Shelbyville.

At the time, I was serving as the director of religious education at St. Joseph Parish, the faith community in which I had grown up.

After Mass, I spent some time in prayer and talked with some parishioners who attended the liturgy with me before walking to the parish’s office around 9:15. In shock, the parish secretary immediately told me about two passenger jets that had been flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York, which had happened respectively at 8:46 and 9:03.

That was when the wonderful flow of my early married life was brought to a sudden halt.

The secretary, the parish’s pastor Father John Fink (who died in 2023), and I watched news coverage of this shocking event.

I later went back to the church to tell the parishioners who were still there what had happened and asked them to pray for our country.

I then went to the building on the parish’s campus where my office was located and turned on a TV. It was a little before 9:45. The first thing I saw was the view of a stationary camera attached to what appeared to me to be an office building I knew was adjacent to the White House. A large plume of smoke could be seen rising along the horizon.

I was confused. This wasn’t New York City. This was Washington, D.C. What was happening? Then I quickly learned that the Pentagon had just been the target of an attack like the one on the World Trade Center.

My confusion was turning to anxiety and fear. That increased exponentially when I saw right before my eyes on the TV in my office the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapse shortly before 10:00.

What kind of world were Cindy and I bringing our first child into? That question was very clearly in my heart and mind for the rest of that day.

Without even thinking about it, I got up and went to the person whom I knew could provide stability and reassurance: Mom. Thankfully, I only had to walk across the parish parking lot to St. Joseph School where my mom Debbi Gallagher (who died in 2015), worked as the school’s secretary.

And she gave stability and reassurance to me on that occasion as we both talked about the dreadful events of the morning.

But the unease and anxiety naturally aroused by watching what was happening, especially in light of the knowledge of the tiny child growing in Cindy’s womb led me—without even thinking about it—to give hints in my conversation with Mom about our news, which Cindy and I had agreed not to share for a few more months.

With her good maternal senses, Mom could read between the lines. And when she did, she turned to me in some surprise and said, “Oh! You and Cindy are expecting—but you’re not supposed to tell me.”

That was a reminder that it’s hard to hide things from Mom, something that many children have learned about their mothers at one time or another.

But while the horror of 9/11 still makes my heart tremble 25 years later, I began to learn later that same day that faith, hope and love were still alive even in the face of the tremendous disbelief, despair and hatred at the heart of the destruction on that day. Indeed, they weren’t just alive. They were triumphant.

That learning began with an unscheduled Mass that Father Fink celebrated early in the afternoon for the students of St. Joseph School and some parishioners. That liturgy was much like the Mass I had attended earlier that day before I knew of the attacks. But returning to the celebration of the Lord’s infinite self-sacrificial love for me and all humanity in the Eucharist meant so much at that difficult time.

Then, on the evening of 9/11, Benedictine Sister Mildred Wannemuehler, a member of Our Lady of Grace Monastery in Beech Grove who later died in 2012, came to St. Joseph to give an adult faith formation presentation. I had scheduled the event months before with the plan that she would reflect on the spirituality of hospitality.

But the agenda for the evening quickly changed in light of the day’s events. Sister Mildred was well-known in the archdiocese in 2001 as a real source of spiritual wisdom.

After the people who gathered to hear her speak prayed Evening Prayer of the Office of the Dead from the Church’s Liturgy of the Hours, Sister Mildred helped all of them, including myself, to begin to spiritually process what had happened and what it meant for the life of faith of all of us.

As a newly married husband and a very newly expectant father, what Sister Mildred offered that evening was a godsend.

I came away that night with a renewed trust that God would help Cindy and me with his grace to create, at least in our small corner of the world, an atmosphere of faith, hope and love in which our son Michael, who would be born on May 1, 2002, and his four brothers who came later, could grow up and thrive. They would have no lived memory of 9/11 but would grow up in a world shaped by it.

I trusted that God would shower that grace upon us through each other, our parents and siblings, our extended family and friends and so many other brothers and sisters in Christ whom we have been blessed to come to know in the intervening 25 years.

That trust only grew as I learned in the coming days of the heroism of so many people who had in a selflessly Christ-like way given of themselves, in many cases all the way to death, in service of those in need on 9/11.

My son Michael, who was growing in Cindy’s womb on 9/11, turned 24 earlier this year. My next two oldest sons, Raphael and Victor, are both starting to live their adult lives.

While the shock of the evil of 9/11 will always be seared into my memory, I hold fast to the triumph of faith, hope and love revealed to the world in Christ’s death and resurrection.

This victory has empowered Cindy and me and so many other parents and grandparents to help those children born since 9/11 to grow up in the light of hope in Christ rather than in the darkness of despair.
 

(Sean Gallagher is a reporter and columnist for The Criterion, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.) †