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It was both collective and personal. A shockwave that reverberates still today.
As we all reflect on 9-11, some only through historical footage, I am reflective that everyone's experience was both unique and identical.
My parents were working in a newsroom when the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Others were in factories, at hospitals, or maybe on the golf course.
People turning 30 this year would have been in preschool.
Everyone on Earth that day -- those working at the World Trade Center and New York City area first responders included -- were doing something when time stood still.
I was in bed, a typical habit of a college student. A freshman at Central Michigan University, I had only been on campus for a few weeks. Excited about my freedom and my future, I was making the most of a brand-new place and group of friends.
My slumber was disrupted by the voice of one of my roommates shouting.
I rubbed my eyes and was directed to a television. There, like the golfers, the journalists or maybe even those in the Twin Towers, I glued myself to the television. A live horror documentary unfolded in front of our eyes, as more terror was rained on the South Tower, on the Pentagon, and on a Flight 93 that courageously ended in a remote area of Pennsylvania.
We were sad. We were stunned. We were angry. Classes were canceled, and a bunch of 18-year-olds tried to make sense of it all.
We played Euchre, seriously discussing what to do next. The carefree laughs and inside jokes of college boys turned solemn and serious.
"We should get gas."
"Should we go home to our families?"
"What about joining the military?"
Eventually, the live-action attack stopped. The magnitude of lives lost was tallied. Stories were shared. A "War on Terror" was declared. There were moments of togetherness. My same group of friends were watching as President George W. Bush defiantly threw out the first pitch of the World Series in late October.
Classes resumed, and the Euchre games became more vivacious. We got wrapped up in school, social gatherings and whatever those on the beginning of a coming-of-age journey do.
Newspapers returned to their normal rhythms. Preschoolers kept growing. Morning golf resumed.
Life went on after Kennedy's assassination. It did after the Challenger explosion, and it did after COVID. Time stops every once in a long while, but it always keeps going.
Gone but not forgotten. Reminders came fast and furious through those first years. I'll never forget sitting with a friend a few summers later as he told me about what he encountered fighting in Afghanistan in the time following 9-11.
I'm thankful that modern technology and storytelling have helped capture the stories of heroism in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania. We've done a good job of remembering those that lost their lives in this horrible tragedy, and the wars that followed. I'm thankful new generations of students, like my kids, are learning about the impact of 9-11 on our country and world.
My mind will forever be stamped by that common area of Thorpe Hall, a bunch of new friends from different backgrounds comforting each other amid a backdrop of uncertainty.
On the same day our nation for the first time realized it wasn't invincible, I realized for the first time that I was, indeed, an adult.
Jeremy Speer is the publisher of The Courier, Findlay, the Sandusky Register, The Advertiser-Tribune, Tiffin, the Norwalk Reflector and Review Times, Fostoria. He can be reached at jeremyspeer@thecourier.com.