During her years at BC, Grace Simmons '05 became UGBC President and the 2005 recipient of Boston College's Finnegan Award, the highest honor an undergraduate can attain. But before that, on Sept. 11, 2001, Simmons remembers being a scared freshman, searching for answers.
Week two, freshman year, September 11, 2001
The air was crisp and the sun shone through a blue sky of perfectly set white clouds. When two planes hit the Twin Towers, our campus felt like it had stopped breathing. Students left their dorm rooms, off-campus apartments and mods to watch television screens in the Carroll School lobby feeling helpless, too far away from family, and chilled by the experience of seeing (most of us for the first time) indisputable tragedy.
When we realized the moment the world did that tragedy was an act of terrorism, we instantly looked to one another for healing. I felt our collective innocence that day. We, freshmen, rushed to O’Neill Plaza to find a friend to hug, to hold hands with, to cry on a shoulder, and were surrounded by faculty, staff and older classmates standing right beside us, feeling the same pain. Nearly all of us had a cell phone held against an ear, trying to locate the dads, moms, guardians and loved ones we had left just weeks prior. We embraced and consoled in our arms the friends whose names we just learned, our new friends from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut particularly concerned about their families’ whereabouts and, like the rest of us, the future.
As a massive crowd gathered on the Plaza, searching for answers and any sense of connection, our Jesuit community responded with hope, uniting a diverse assembly of students, faculty and staff through the power of prayer. As our Jesuit community’s reflections were read at noon to an audience of thousands, for some, goose bumps disappeared and tears subsided.
In prayer, we remembered.
Read our next story from Brooklyn native, David Quigley, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of history whose research focus is 19th-century New York City.