By Gene Robbins, Managing Editor
Maggie Rose Schmidt dropped a rose on the 9-11 monument at the Woods Road firehouse, then walked away dabbing her eyes.
She had attended the remembrance ceremony last Thursday evening, and was moved by the words of honor and the reading of the names of those responders who lost their lives in New York City that day.
Ms. Schmidt said she distinctly remembered the day of terror. She was in Seneca, S.C., celebrating her mother’s 65th birthday on Sept. 10 and had planned to fly back to New Jersey the next day.
The crisis grounded all airline flights across the country. After terrorists had hijacked and flown two airliners into the World Trade Center towers and had taken a third, apparently intending to crash it into Washington, D.C., no one knew what could happen next.
"All I wanted to do is get home to my husband," Ms. Schmidt remembered, still dabbing. "He had to drive to Washington, D.C., to meet me."
"Everybody lost that day, and we’ll continue to lose," she said. "It will never end. There’s always going to be somebody who does not like what you do and wants to take our freedom away. They want us to live like them."
She had walked to Thursday’s ceremony from the nearby neighborhood, one of about 100 people to attend the remembrance ceremony on the 13th anniversary of the attacks that changed America.
That morning, the Volunteer Fire Company No. 2 on Route 206 held a ceremony, too. Each event was at a memorial garden that are dominated by monuments made from a piece of steel from the towers. Both ceremonies featured the reading of the names of the 23 New York police officers, 37 Port Authority officers and 343 firefighters and paramedics who gave their lives that day to rescue others.
Company 2’s ceremony was punctuated by three sets of clangs on the fire bell for a line of duty death as former fire chief Patrick Kelly reminded all of the times of 10:05 and 10:28 a.m. — the moments that the each of the towers collapsed.
The district’s two state Assembly members spoke briefly in the evening at Woods Road. Donna Simon recalled the "overwhelming courage" of firefighters, burdened with 65 pounds of gear, pressing up dozens of flights of stairs of the towers in the hunt for people to be rescued.
The next day, she remembered, American flags were everywhere.
"We remain resilient," she said. "We are Americans."
Jack Ciattarelli said the day should be one dedicated to teaching about the destructiveness of hate and the power of tolerance and diversity.
Mr. Ciattarelli said the day always reminded him of a proverb he saw once on an Irish headstone: "Death leaves a heartache no one can heal; love leaves a memory no one can steal."
Ms. Schmidt had not lost a close friend or relative that day, she said.
"But part of America was lost and we’re still trying to regain what was taken from us," she said. "And we will."

