My mom is a 9/11 survivor, a title that, like survivors of most any traumatic occurrence, has no resplendent quality. It’s a weighty badge, earned from a day marred by fear, death and an irrevocable connection to something huge and horrible.

And yet, it’s a title that I felt I’d inherited in part through her experience. For as long as I can remember, the events of that day have been present with me, soldered deeply into my psyche, though I wasn’t there to witness them firsthand. It was a confusing amalgam of emotions, largely compounded by my mom’s general reticence to discuss the topic outside of a personal account she self-published several years ago to process her yearslong PTSD. I struggled to know if I had the right to grieve something that happened to her, and not to me.

Not exactly a secret, my complicated thoughts and feelings about my deeply personal connection to New York’s darkest day had always registered internally as something furtive. When the opportunity to publish my story in The New York Times arose, I still struggled with how to feel. On the one hand, I was overwhelmingly excited to have a byline in one of my favorite publications, a long-held dream of mine. Still, I wondered if sharing my conflicted emotions about how I should — and whether I could grieve 9/11 — would register as insincere, or worse, offend those whose friends and family didn’t come home that day.

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These sentiments........

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