Longing for Belonging
by Cheryl Lacey, DGSJ, ©2026
(Sep. 11, 2026) — I arrived in New York only days before the towers fell. My daughter and I had come to begin a new chapter – the kind of hopeful, uncertain start that is entirely personal, until history intervenes with sudden and irreversible force. Instead of the life I had planned for us, we found ourselves at the epicentre of the largest trauma of the 21st century.
That day changed me in an instant. But the days, weeks and months that followed changed me for life – a quiet, imperfect time in which a city of strangers began to find its way back to one another.
Traffic Lights
The morning after the towers fell, I took my daughter for a walk. We were living in Brooklyn. The streets were filled with an unnatural silence broken only by the sound of motor vehicles and the soft flapping of American flags. People moved almost in a daze, their concentration on placing one foot in front of the other, with the occasional glance at others walking by.
As we approached a set of traffic lights, I noticed a woman standing alone, quietly sobbing. Without hesitation I reached out and took her hand. My daughter’s hand was in my other one. The three of us stood there in a small, unbroken line for I do not know how long – long enough for her breathing to steady, long enough for the sobbing to stop. She patted my hand and walked away. Not a single word passed between us. Nothing needed to be said. We understood.
The Newspaper
A few days later I was sitting on a subway platform reading a newspaper filled with photographs of the dead and the last words they had spoken to those they loved. There was an unwritten rule that New Yorkers avoid speaking to one another on the subway, but a woman sat down beside me and asked about the tote bag I was carrying. I answered. She asked something else. I closed the paper and gave her my full attention.
We talked then about work, about travel and about ordinary things. We boarded the same train and kept talking. When I reached my stop and stood to say goodbye, I wished her a safe day. She replied, “Thank you for your company. I lost my husband in Tower One.”
Closing that newspaper was not something she had asked of me. Looking back, I believe the two of us were meant to meet for those few moments. Our connection gave her a strength that she would take into the many moments that would follow – the sudden, unavoidable reminders, wherever she went, of a loss many could not imagine.
The Playground
The first weekend after 9/11 I sat alone on a park bench watching my daughter play. All around were benches filled with mothers talking among themselves and children playing.
Then I noticed, on the other side of the playground, another woman sitting alone. I walked over and asked if I could join her. She said yes, and we fell into conversation about faith, fear, and relocating to New York, while our daughters began to play together.
She wanted for her daughter the same thing I wanted for mine – the same hope most parents have: a better life than the one they themselves had known. It was why we had both come to New York – me a Catholic from Australia dressed in shorts and a singlet, she a Muslim from the Middle East dressed in a niqab.
The Rainbow
In the staffroom of a large school in Brooklyn, a group of teachers began talking about bucket lists. One teacher said that at the very top of hers was seeing a rainbow. I’ve loved rainbows since I was a child and had never once considered that this wonderfully natural, fleeting thing – something I’d seen to often to count – was a vision some people go their whole lives without witnessing.
The Mayor
Rudy Giuliani was the most present and noble leader of any community I have lived in. In the weeks after the attacks, he moved from funeral to funeral, firehouse to firehouse, and still it was never enough for him. In early October he told CNN he was sorry for the services he had been unable to attend.
“I think every one of these men should have the mayor, the fire commissioner, the police commissioner present for their burial service,” he said. But the sheer numbers made that impossible: “We can’t be at all of them because there are 20, 25 of them a day.”[i]
New Yorkers followed his example, and so did I. I can no longer recall how many funerals and memorial services I attended in those months. What remains etched in my memory is the healing that took place between strangers – people I would never see again, yet who became some of the strongest threads in the fabric of my life.
The Balloons
I attended the funeral of a colleague’s sister, who had been burned by airplane fuel while standing at a bus stop. Gone with her was a treasured tradition – a single helium balloon she delivered by hand to each family member on their birthday.
Four Words
A report had emerged about a father who ordered his sons to stone their sister to death because she had been seen speaking with an American soldier. I mentioned it, horrified, to a principal at an all-girls’ Jewish school. She looked at me and said four words, “Clearly you’re not religious.”
On Education
Today, I find myself returning to these memories more than to the day itself. Hands held at a crossing. A newspaper closed for a stranger’s strength. A rainbow someone had never seen and a balloon some would never receive again. Two mothers from opposite ends of the earth, watching their daughters play. A brief conversation that confused and enlightened.
For months on end, missing posters covered shopfronts and car windows – faces of people who had perished. But for the loved ones who put them up, those posters were part of a grieving process with no rules and no ending that arrives on cue.
It is out of that time, and everything 9/11 set in motion, that my commitment to families and educators solidified – to education free from indoctrination and submission, founded on first principles.
Society is complex, but one thing remains undeniably true: every child is born to one biological male and one biological female. This makes us all fundamentally equal. It is our life experience that can never be equal.
And in my advocacy for First Principles On Education®, I have reflected on natural law and its recognition of these fundamental truths as a necessary constant underpinning national security and world peace. Yet I have come to wonder whether natural law goes far enough – whether a lasting peace among free people requires something clearer and more rigorously grounded: an objective moral law, derived solely from the facts of reality and the requirements of human life.
Perhaps this question is also shaped by where I have found my deepest sense of belonging. Despite being born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, New York is more my home. It has fed my heart and soul with healing, hope, resilience and belonging – and taught me to carry this belief with me everywhere: that any lasting world peace can only come from an objective moral law and faith in one another.
[i] https://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/10/06/rec.giuliani.apology/index.html
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