Remember the Human Being Inside the Uniform September 2026 Edition
I hope you’ll take your time with this one. Behind every name is a life, a family, and a story worthy of being remembered.
As we approach the 25th anniversary of September 11, I find myself returning to a question I first asked nearly twenty-five years ago: What would our civilization look like without first responders?
We use the words first responder so easily that sometimes I wonder whether we have stopped hearing what they mean.
A first responder is not simply a uniform.
It is a human being.
A mother. A father. A grandmother. A grandfather.
Someone’s son or daughter. Someone’s husband or wife. Someone who kissed a loved one goodbye before beginning a shift, perhaps expecting nothing more unusual than an ordinary day’s work.
These are the human beings we depend upon to move toward danger when our natural instinct tells us to move away from it.
I have carried that realization in my heart for nearly twenty-five years.
It began with an encounter only six days after September 11, 2001.
From Reclaiming Respect
Visit to a New York City Firehouse After 9/11
Six days after September 11, 2001, I traveled from Baltimore to New York City for my weekly voice lesson. Just a block away, on the corner of 48th Street and 8th Avenue, I joined a line that stretched for hours outside a fire station. I waited for three hours with others who had come to pay their respects.
When I finally entered, I was greeted by a lone survivor, the only member of that firehouse left from the horrific catastrophe. He welcomed me with quiet dignity. We spoke for a few moments, and he asked me to sign my name and message in their memorial book.
That encounter is forever etched into my heart. To stand in the presence of one who had lost nearly all his brave coworkers, yet remained at his post, was humbling beyond words. Can you imagine what our civilization would look like without the protection of first responders?
Excerpt from Reclaiming Respect, A Blueprint for Peace in a Divided World 2025
What I Did Not Include in the Book
There is another part of that encounter that I did not include in Reclaiming Respect.
As I stood before that firefighter, I was doing everything I could to hold back my tears.
I had come there to pay my respects, and somehow, I felt that the last thing this grieving man needed was to find himself comforting me. I wanted, in whatever small way I could, to offer comfort to him.
He asked me what I did for a living.
I told him that I was a Cantor and that I had come to New York, as I did weekly, for a voice lesson.
Somehow, during those few moments together, it came up that I would write my name in Hebrew in their memorial book.
So I did.
While my hand moved across that page forming the Hebrew letters of my name, I found myself doing something that I have done throughout my life in moments of loss.
Silently, I began reciting a memorial prayer.
There I was, standing in a New York City firehouse only six days after September 11, writing my name in Hebrew while silently praying for men I had never met.
At the same time, I was conscious of the long line of people still waiting outside.
I did not want to take too long.
They, too, had waited for hours. They, too, needed their moment to enter that firehouse and somehow express what was in their hearts.
Therefore, my prayer was silent.
My visit was brief but the moment has lasted nearly twenty-five years.
I can still see that firefighter.
I can still remember trying not to cry.
I can still remember my hand writing those Hebrew letters.
I can still remember silently praying at that very spot while a devastated city grieved around us.
There are encounters in life that do not announce themselves as life-changing when they occur.
Only years later do we realize that we have carried them with us ever since.
This was one of mine.
Nearly Twenty-Five Years Later
This summer, I returned to New York.
It was July 14, 2026, ten days after our nation marked 250 years since the Declaration of Independence.
This time I stood at the National September 11 Memorial.
Nearly a quarter of a century had passed since that afternoon in the firehouse.
I took out my camera and slowly panned across the bronze parapet surrounding the Memorial pool.
Name after name moved through the frame.
We all know the enormous numbers associated with September 11., but numbers can become statistics, and statistics, with the passage of time, can become distant.
A name asks something more of us.
A name asks us to remember a life.
The names of those memorialized at the 9/11 Memorial, July 14, 2026. Video by the author.
As I moved my camera across those names, I found myself thinking:
Don’t just read the names.
Remember the lives.
Somebody’s mother.
Somebody’s father.
Somebody’s grandmother.
Somebody’s grandfather.
One of the names that actually passed beneath my camera was Charles William Mathers.
At the time I recorded the video, I did not know his story.
I do now.
Charles Mathers was 61 years old. He had served six years in the United States Navy. He and his wife, Margaret, had been married for 39 years and raised three children. Family memorials also remember him as a beloved grandfather and approximately a quarter of a century, he served his community in Sea Girt, New Jersey, as a volunteer firefighter.
On September 11, however, Charles Mathers was not responding as a firefighter.
He was at work.
He was a managing director with Marsh & McLennan in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
He never came home. His name is now inscribed on the Memorial’s North Pool, panel N-4, the name my camera happened to pass across nearly twenty-five years later.
Think about the humanity contained in that single name.
A husband.
A father.
A grandfather.
A Navy veteran.
A man who had spent twenty-five years volunteering to answer other people’s calls for help.
The grandfather whose name passed beneath my camera had spent a quarter of a century helping protect other people’s families.
Once you know that, the engraving is no longer merely lettering in bronze.
It is Charles.
Somebody’s Mother
Then there was Yamel Josefina Merino.
Yamel was only 24 years old.
She was an emergency medical technician and the mother of a young boy named Kevin. After becoming a mother, she earned her GED, became an EMT and worked her way into MetroCare Ambulance’s 911 division. She had already been named the company’s EMT of the Year and hoped one day to become a nurse.
On September 11, Yamel was among the first emergency responders to arrive at the World Trade Center.
She volunteered to move closer to the towers while her partner remained with their ambulance.
She was providing medical aid to people escaping the South Tower when it collapsed.
She did not come home to her son.
A mother moved toward danger because strangers needed her.
Those words deserve to be read slowly.
Because when we say EMT, we can forget mother.
When we say first responder, we can forget the child who was waiting at home.
Somebody’s Father
FDNY firefighter Kevin J. Smith was a 23-year veteran of the Fire Department and an original member of its Hazardous Materials Company 1.
He was also a husband and the father of eight children.
On September 11, Kevin and his company responded to the World Trade Center. He was among the 343 members of the FDNY who were killed that day. His daughter Josephine later followed the path she had dreamed about as a child and herself joined the FDNY.
Eight children did not think of him primarily as a statistic.
They did not know him principally as one of “the 343.”
They knew him as Dad.
That distinction matters.
Somebody’s Grandmother
First responder service does not end with the young.
Sonia Agron had worked in emergency medical services as an EMT and instructor. By September 11, an injury had made it difficult for her to continue working as a technician.
Her husband, Joe, was an NYPD officer who responded to the World Trade Center.
For hours she did not know whether he was alive.
He survived.
Sonia initially promised him that she would not go to Ground Zero, but the instinct to help proved too powerful. She ultimately volunteered for overnight recovery shifts with the American Red Cross. The 9/11 Memorial & Museum describes her as a witness and first responder and, years later, writes of the same woman as a nurturing grandmother.
Her explanation for why she felt compelled to help was wonderfully simple:
“That first responder stuff doesn’t leave you.”
A mother.
A father.
A grandmother.
A grandfather.
They are not categories.
They are human beings.
Have We Become Accustomed to Courage?
Perhaps this is where complacency begins.
We hear a siren and expect someone to come.
We see flames and expect someone to enter the building.
We call 911 and expect someone to answer.
When someone is bleeding, trapped, frightened, injured in an automobile accident, suffering a heart attack, facing violence or experiencing the worst moment of his or her life, we expect trained strangers to leave whatever they were doing and come toward us.
We expect courage almost as though it were a public utility but courage is not a public utility.
Courage lives inside a human being.
That firefighter has someone who loves him.
That police officer has someone waiting for her.
That EMT may have packed a child’s lunch before beginning the shift.
That paramedic may be a grandmother.
That volunteer firefighter may be a grandfather named Charles whose name, nearly twenty-five years later, happened to pass beneath my camera.
Sometimes the people answering the call do not come home.
The Midtown firehouse I visited in those terrible days after September 11 suffered an extraordinary loss. Engine 54, Ladder 4 and Battalion 9, known as the “Pride of Midtown,”lost 15 members on September 11. An entire shift was lost, more members than any other New York City firehouse. Those 15 men left behind 28 children.
Twenty-eight children.
Again, the number matters.
But imagine saying instead:
Twenty-eight children had someone missing from their lives.
That is the difference between a statistic and a human story.
What Respect Requires of Us
Respect does not require us to pretend that every institution is perfect.
It does not require us to believe that every person wearing a uniform is beyond criticism.
Respect asks something much more fundamental.
It asks us not to lose sight of the human being inside the uniform.
It asks us to remember the discipline, training, sacrifice and risk that we routinely expect from people whose names we may never learn.
It asks us not to become so accustomed to being protected that protection begins to feel like an entitlement.
Perhaps it asks us to recover something that seemed almost instinctive in those days immediately following September 11.
Gratitude.
Human connection.
The awareness that we depend upon one another.
Six days after the attacks, people were willing to stand in a line for three hours simply to walk into a firehouse and tell grieving firefighters:
We see you.
I was one of them.
I did not have eloquent words for that firefighter.
Instead, I wrote my name in Hebrew and silently, while my hand moved across the page, I prayed.
Nearly twenty-five years later, I stood beside the Memorial and moved my camera across other people’s names.
Only afterward did I begin discovering the lives behind some of them.
Charles.
Yamel.
Kevin.
Sonia.
Also, thousands of others whose stories deserve more from us than a passing glance.
That brings me back to the question I wrote in Reclaiming Respect all those years ago:
Can you imagine what our civilization would look like without the protection of first responders?
As we approach the 25th anniversary of September 11, I find myself asking another question as well:
Have we become so accustomed to their courage that we have forgotten what it costs?
Every name was a life.
Every uniform contained a human heart.
Every person was someone’s someone.
May we never become so accustomed to being protected that we forget to respect those who do the protecting.
That too, is what it means to reclaim respect.
If a first responder has touched your life or the life of your family, I invite you to leave that person’s name in the comments. Not simply a title or department. Their name. Let us remember and show our respect to the human being.
A Note of Respect
To the families and loved ones of those memorialized here: I have approached their stories with the deepest respect and have made every effort to present them accurately. If I have unintentionally misstated or omitted any detail, please accept my sincere apologies. My intention is to honor their lives, preserve their memory, and ensure that we continue to remember the individuals behind the names.
