Plumes of smoke billow from the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks. [Michael Foran/Flickr/Wikimedia]
Twenty-five years ago this week, the world was turned upside down by the horror of 9/11. Here are three stories from that day, in which love shines through the madness.
Christine Egan and her younger brother Michael had immigrated to Canada from England in the 1960s.
Christine became a nurse epidemiologist and settled in Winnipeg. She earned her PhD from the University of Manitoba and worked for Health Canada, delivering community health services to remote Indigenous communities across the North.
Michael moved to New Jersey, where he lived with his wife Anna and their two sons, Matthew and Jonathan. Michael worked as an insurance executive with Aon Corp., in the World Trade Center in Manhattan.
Despite the distance between the two siblings, Michael, 51, and Christine, 55, always remained close, united by the Yorkshire accents they had never lost and their love of all things British.
In early September 2001, Christine flew to New Jersey intending to stay with her teenage nephew Matthew, while Michael and Anna took a trip to Bermuda to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary.
Christine arrived a few days early, and on the morning of Sept. 11, travelled into Manhattan with Michael to check out the view from his office on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower.
Soon after they arrived at the building, the north tower was hit by a hijacked airliner. About 15 minutes later, another airliner struck the south tower.
In an interview with The New York Times, published in the paper’s Portraits of Grief collection, Anna said Michael called her from the burning tower that morning:
“You made it,” she said. “No, we’re stuck,” Michael replied.
While still on the phone with her husband, Anna watched on TV as the south tower collapsed, taking the lives of Michael, Christine and many others with it.
Anna and Michael’s last words to each other were, “I love you, darling.”
A New York City fireman calls for 10 more rescue workers to make their way into the rubble of the World Trade Center. [U.S. Navy/Wikimedia]
Peter Feidelberg, 34, and Meredith Ewart, 29, also worked at Aon Corp. in the World Trade Center. The two had grown up in the suburbs of Montreal and had struck up a romance after meeting at a corporate office in the city.
Not long after, they moved to the U.S. and were married in a quiet civil ceremony in New York.
Meredith and her father Robert Ewart shared the same birthday—June 25. Every year, they celebrated together at home. There were two birthday cakes: chocolate for Meredith and orange for her dad.
In 2000, however, she and Peter had purchased a house in Hoboken, N.J., and were unable to make it back to Canada for the joint birthday celebration.
During a walk on the evening of Meredith’s birthday, Peter made good on the fact that he had never formally proposed to her before they were married. He surprised Meredith by getting down on his knees, asking her to marry him and presenting her with a diamond ring.
“Needless to say, she accepted the proposal and the birthday present,” Meredith’s father Robert told The New York Times.
Both Meredith and Peter were passionate about adventure sports, including high-mountain skiing and scuba diving. According to the Toronto Star, she and Peter had taken a September diving trip to Cozumel, Mexico, and had returned to work in Manhattan only days before the attacks on the World Trade Center.
It took more than three years after the tragedy for Peter’s remains to be officially identified, via DNA testing. Meredith’s remains were never found, compounding her family’s trauma.
“She had these beautiful eyes,” her father Robert remembered.
As for Peter, “He was just a prince of a fellow,” Robert said. “We just loved him.”
On Sept. 11, 2001, 38 civilian aircraft in U.S. airspace were diverted to the Gander International Airport as part of the Canadian Armed Forces’ Operation Yellow Ribbon. More than 6,000 stranded passengers and crew were warmly welcomed by the community. [Gander Historical Society]
Beulah Cooper is a 9/11 legend.
A long-time volunteer with The Royal Canadian Legion Gander, N.L., Branch, Cooper—like many in her community—rushed to provide care and support to more than 6,000 airline passengers and crew suddenly stranded in Gander after U.S. airspace was closed on Sept. 11, 2001.
As calls went out across Gander and a string of nearby communities to assist the newcomers, Cooper made trays of sandwiches and delivered them to her branch, where many passengers were being sheltered.
“When I heard the planes were coming here, I said, ‘Well I know one thing—they’ll be looked after,’” Cooper told CBC. “It’s just part of our way of life. Helping someone else just comes naturally.”
At the Legion that morning—still a time before cell phones were ubiquitous—Cooper offered to drive passengers to a local hotel so they could use its pay phones. She also took people shopping for clothes, invited some into her home for meals and showers, and provided a sympathetic ear and a shoulder to cry on.
One of the women Cooper comforted was Hannah O’Rourke, who had been flying home to New York from a trip to Ireland, when her plane was diverted to Gander.
After landing and learning the awful news from Manhattan, O’Rourke was desperate to reach her son Kevin, a firefighter with Rescue Company 2 in Brooklyn, who had been reported missing.
Cooper’s son was also a firefighter. She understood O’Rourke’s fear.
After five days in Gander, flights resumed and O’Rourke made it home to New York, where she learned that Kevin had died while trying to save lives in the north tower of the World Trade Center.
She called her new friend back in Gander to share her grief.
Like so many others who met and bonded in Newfoundland that week, Cooper and O’Rourke remained close over the years. Their characters, and their friendship, even became one of the central plot lines of the hit Canadian musical Come From Away, which tells the story of the Gander “plane people.”
When Come From Away debuted on Broadway in 2017, both women were in the audience on opening night, seated together, holding hands and shedding tears as their story—and O’Rourke’s memories of Kevin—were re-enacted on a New York stage.
Hannah O’Rourke died in 2025, aged 91.
Beulah Cooper is still volunteering and welcoming newcomers at the Gander Legion.
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