The week the Twin Towers fell, Jonathan Egan had moved from his New York home to Los Angeles and had started his first week of college. He was only a few days in when he heard a knock on the door from his roommate and the resident director.
“I thought I was in trouble,” he tells The Independent. “I got down to the living room and my roommates were huddled around the TV and said, ‘Hey Jon, look at your city.’ That moment I saw the towers falling, and I knew my life and the world had changed forever.”
A quarter of a century has passed since terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center complex. As the north and south towers collapsed, 2,996 people were killed, and thousands more were injured. The scale of the tragedy reached across the world, with victims from more than 90 countries.
open image in galleryFor Mr Egan, then an 18-year-old freshman, the tragedy was even more personal as his father Michael, 51, and his aunt Christine, 55, both from Hull, were on the 103rd floor of the south tower.
Christine Egan was a “selfless” nurse who had moved from England to Canada, where she dedicated her life to helping the Inuit communities. She had only been in town to look after Mr Egan’s younger brother Matthew, who has Down Syndrome, as his mother and father planned to travel to Bermuda for their 20th wedding anniversary.
“Auntie Chris came to take care of my brother Matthew,” he says. “The purpose of her visit that day was to see her little brother’s view and office.”
open image in galleryAn hour after he watched the events of September 11, he spoke to his mother Anna, and she recounted the heartbreaking phone call she’d had with Michael as the towers collapsed.
“He was 103 floors up, and they were trying to get to the roof. They were unable to get to the roof for helicopters because the doors were locked,” he says. “It was hot and they couldn’t breathe, and [he]was telling my mother he loves her and kiss the children, and then my mother saw the towers falling and the phone dropped.”
He remembers his father, who had moved to the United States eight years prior after his company was acquired by professional services firm Aon, as a “jokester” who “loved England, loved Hull City, loved football, rugby, cricket, and a pint of Boddington’s”.
open image in galleryHis father had tried to explain the concept of Murphy’s Law to him: that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. As Mr Egan witnessed the Twin Towers fall, he felt he had “learned that lesson”.
“When I saw those towers falling, the first thing I thought was, ‘well s***, he’s right,’” Mr Egan says.
Mr Egan has since found out that his father and aunt both tried to help people: “I know that my dad got people out that day. When they were telling people to stay in the south tower, he got people out.”
open image in galleryAt 43 years old, Mr Egan has spent his life trying to honour the memory of his “proud Yorkshireman” father. Mr Egan went back to college and achieved the highest grades he could in order to transfer to a top university in Boston, after which he moved back to New York City. He now works for an insurance brokerage firm.
“When 9/11 happened, my family’s assets were frozen. We didn’t have my father’s body, you know, he was the sole breadwinner. My mother stopped working when I was born, and because of that, I didn’t know what was happening,” he says. “All I knew was I needed to make sure my family was okay and I need to make my father proud.”
Mr Egan entered a brand new dimension of grief after he became a father to two children, five-year-old Dean and two-year-old Stella. In a full-circle moment, his son started school in the days before the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
“I’m grieving in a whole new way as a parent, as a child, because now I understand a whole new perspective of what my father was thinking,” he explains.
open image in galleryAs the co-CEO of the Queen Elizabeth II September 11 garden in Manhattan, Mr Egan has worked with the UK-based charity Since 9/11, which aims to educate the next generation and ensure the incident’s legacy builds hope from tragedy. He will spend the anniversary at the main memorial and the Queen Elizabeth garden in an attempt to keep himself busy.
“I speak to many family members on a regular basis, especially this time of the year, and we all say the same thing. September 11 hits and there’s this kind of uneasiness in your stomach. September 12 hits and you are relieved,” he says.
“I’m always talking about it more and thinking about my kids, thinking about all these other family members who I’ve only got to know more and [have got] closer year after year, so my love for them grows, [but] it’s a tough time.”