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By Zerline Hughes Spruill

Once the numbers started coming through on radio and television broadcasts – the number of people who had died on the various planes, the flight numbers, the increasing death toll by each hour – I realized how close to home the events of 9/11/2001 were. Not the fact that the flights came out of Boston, the city next door to Cambridge, which I had just begun calling home. But the fact that a full week prior to 9/11/2001, my mother concluded her Labor Day weekend visit and returned to Los Angeles. She flew out of Boston Logan Airport on United Airlines. Flight 175 – the very same flight that headed out a week later on 9/11. Twenty-five years after that horrible day, I still get chills from the thought of losing my mom, living with the 9/11 jokes that most of us are now desensitized to, and trying to make sense of the politics, war and racism that followed. As the hashtag goes, 'never forget.'

On 9/11/2001, I was pushing the media cart back into the library storage room when I heard the librarian and media specialist chattering about. As a middle school journalism teacher and Boston Globe freelance journalist, I was excited to share my real-life reporter experiences to middle school students two to three times a week. I also couldn't believe a middle school – a public middle school, at that – invested in its students enough to hire a journalist like me to teach the principles of journalism two to three times a week. After I dismissed my Tuesday class and went to the library to return my equipment, the media specialist looked a bit frantic and told me to plug in the TV that I brought back from the classroom. We saw the replays over and over again, but we didn't know what we were witnessing.

What I did know was that I was more than thankful that I had just dismissed my middle school journalism students for their third period. Another teacher would have to interrupt their planned lesson to explain to these baby millennials what had just happened. I was not yet a mother. I would not have known how to explain this horrific, developing atrocity to them – the gore, the hatred, the politics, the loss of life.

I watched the Twin Towers engulfed in flames barrel down to the ground from a tube TV at Pollard Middle School in Needham, Massachusetts – a 30-minute drive from Boston Logan Airport where the two Boeing 767 commercial airliners took off before plummeting into the two New York landmarks, killing 2,753 people.

Mommy says she and Daddy, too, were watching it with no words to share among each other from their home in Southern California around 6 a.m. Upon revisiting 9/11 on the 25th anniversary, I called my mom to remind her of what I call a close call. I asked her to envision what she thinks she would have done had her flight been one week later. I was surprised at my mother's response, with her being a 35-year-tenured mediator who champions talking things out.

"I probably would have been among those who said, 'let's get 'em,'" said my mom, who was 53 in 2001. "I don't think there was any negotiation going on. There may have been. There is always hope if there's some kind of action taken."

She then added what she's learned about Laurel Homer, the 25-year-old daughter of 9/11 victim, First Officer LeRoy Homer Jr.

"She said she's been in therapy all her life, and she's still not ok," said mom. "All of her life, she's had to put up with being singled out, bullied."

During the same phone call this afternoon, I told mommy how my life, too, would have been different had I lost her 25 years ago. I would have also been in lifelong therapy even though I was 24 in 2001. I likely would not have become a mother. I may not have made it to age 25, in fact, considering the constant reminders of that day. Whether directly or indirectlyimpacted by that day's events and its aftermath, I can guarantee that none of us will ever forget.