At the approach of its 25th anniversary, 9/11 is being called the day that changed the world.

And for a brief few days following that very worst day, it did.

Absolute evil was met by pure good and we were united by what was best in us.

The dead were remembered for what their loved ones most loved about them. There was no talk of liars or abusers or cheats in the obituaries and eulogies.

And the living were left with the example of the unhesitating first responders who had perished seeking to save people they had never met.

An invitation to magical thinking came that day as the air began to clear after the collapse of the second tower. Thousands of orange-and-black monarch butterflies appeared, impossibly delicate as they fluttered past steel girders twisted by astonishing violence, their colors vibrant amid acrid-smelling gray smoke and dust.

“Souls,” a firefighter exclaimed.

The butterflies proceeded on what seemed to surely be more than just their annual migration to forested mountains in Mexico. They wafted all but weightless through air where jumper after jumper had plummeted.

I can still too vividly see the figures that began as little more than specks in the cloudless sky that morning. But even as they quickly became more distinguishable as individuals, they all remained governed by the same indifferent law of nature; a falling object accelerates at 32 feet per second squared, minus any air resistance, be the object a lead weight dropped by Galileo from the Tower of Pisa or a human being leaping from the Twin Towers of Downtown Manhattan.

Male or female, young or old, healthy or ill, urban or suburban, Black or white or Hispanic or Asian, married or single, parent or childless, straight or gay, rich or poor, generous or miserly, kind or cruel, fierce or meek, virtuous or sinful, dreamy or practical, toned or flabby, Christian or Jew or Muslim or Hindu, all fell at the same ever-increasing rate. The only variants were density and surface area.

Mundane business papers wafted gently down, but even the most decent person was soon plummeting at nearly 150 miles per hour. Those who leaped from the topmost floors of the North Tower fell for as long as nine seconds. The people on the floors closest to where the plane actually hit had maybe seven seconds, still time to think of loved ones and pray to their particular notion of the Almighty.

A Roman Catholic, for example, would have been able to say a Hail Mary but not an entire Act of Contrition. Everybody had time to utter “Oh, God!” or “God, no!” or some other plea even atheists cry at the onrush of death. All likely remained as keenly conscious as skydivers, all the more intensely aware of the difference between dead weight and living. They must have felt their own unique shape, apart from whatever they had ever pretended to be, the boundless contours of what could rightly be called their soul.

Some jumped together, holding hands. Most leaped singly, often tumbling as they fell. At least one man stayed feet-first, his red-and-blue tie streaming above him. But most were on their backs as they reached the lower floors, facing the heavens if not necessarily heaven. Their last sight was of the perfect baby-blue sky as they struck the pavement with a velocity that instantly turned a living person into a bright red splatter.

The sound was jarring, loud, a body becoming a bomb, the person ceasing to have any shape at all save what lived on in those who remembered them. A firefighter outside the towers who had been watching from beneath his helmet brim asked aloud a question many would remember thinking.

“How could anybody jump from up there?”

An answer came from FDNY Captain Timmy Stackpole, who had arrived at the foot of the South Tower. He had survived being terribly burned in a fire.

“They’re choosing their own fate,” he now said. “Nobody wants to burn.”

People kept jumping until the whole South Tower came down. Stackpole was killed. So was FDNY chaplain Mychal Judge, who was that rare person brought out intact. Father Mychal was the first fatality officially recorded in what the New York City Medical Examiner designated Disaster Manhattan (DM). A photograph by Shannon Stapleton of first responders carrying out the body of DM0001 would........

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