Twenty-Five Years Later, We Remember

Today marks twenty-five years since September 11, 2001. It’s one of those days that split time into before and after, for people everywhere, not just in the US. Nearly 3,000 people died that day, and they came from close to 90 countries. This was never only an American tragedy. I’ve lived in Turkey, call Canada home now, work on a team spread across dozens of countries, and count expats and immigrants among my closest friends here. Grief like this doesn’t stop at a border. It changed how the whole world thought about safety, travel, and each other.

Twenty-five years on, we still hold that memory close, and we think about the families everywhere who carry that loss every single day, not just today.

What strikes me every year is how many people turn to writing to process something this big. Grief doesn’t always fit into a conversation. Sometimes it needs a page.

That’s something our community does beautifully. Across WordPress.com, people all over the world have spent years building spaces to remember: personal reflections on where they were that morning, deep dives into the history of the memorials built afterward, quiet tributes to the small moments that don’t make the history books.

A couple from our own community:

The World Will Never Forget 9/11 is exactly what it sounds like, an entire blog dedicated to keeping the memory of that day alive, from the Memorial Plaza to the stories behind it.

Ephemeral New York has spent years documenting the small, personal memorials tucked into corners of the city, the ones you’d walk past without noticing unless someone pointed them out.

This is exactly why WordPress.com exists. From day one, our mission has been to give everyone, everywhere, a place to share their voice, whatever that voice needs to say. Sometimes that’s a recipe blog or a small business finding its first customers. Sometimes it’s someone working through the hardest thing that ever happened to their city, their family, or their country, one post at a time. We built this platform to hold it all, and we always will.

This is what community looks like to me. Not one big monument, but thousands of small ones, kept alive by people everywhere who decided their corner of the internet was worth using to remember.

To everyone who lost someone that day, and everyone who’s lost someone since to illnesses tied to that day: we’re thinking of you. To the first responders and regular people who ran toward danger instead of away from it: thank you, from the bottom of our hearts.