09/17/2026
A Tribute for the 25th Anniversary of September 11th
Twenty-five years.
It doesn't feel that long, does it? Not when you grew up here or moved to this shore community to raise your families - in Brielle, in Manasquan, in Point Pleasant, in Sea Girt, in Spring Lake, in Spring Lake Heights, in Wall. Not when this is the shoreline you've walked, whether it was your whole life or the years after 9-11. The same seven towns, the same church bells, the same boardwalk, the same community spirit. A quarter of a century is a long time by the calendar. It is no time at all in the heart.
We gather today not as seven separate towns, but as one shore community, because that's what we've always been to each other. And twenty-five years ago, on a clear blue Tuesday morning, that community lost sixteen of its own.
Sixteen neighbors, family members, and friends. All loved ones. Sixteen people who did what so many along this coast did every single morning - caught the same early train, the same ferry across the harbor, walked into the same city where they built their careers. Some boarded planes to travel to family, work, or a peaceful vacation. They were husbands and wives. Parents, children, and friends. Familiar faces we saw every day. And on that morning, they simply never came home.
That is the grief this anniversary carries. It is real, and it is allowed to still be real, even twenty-five years later. Grief on this scale doesn't run on a schedule, and no one in this crowd needs permission to still feel it.
But if you were here in the weeks after - if you remember it - you also remember what this community became. You remember the flags that went up on every porch and never really came down. You remember a community that simply showed up for itself, again and again, for as long as it was needed. Out of the worst morning this country has known, these seven towns showed each other who we really are.
And that is the piece we owe to the young people standing here today - the ones who never knew a world before that Tuesday, who know September 11th only as history, not as memory. To them we say: this is not just a date in a textbook. Sixteen names belonged to sixteen lives, lived in the same towns you are growing up in. Carry them. Carry the way this community answered heartbreak with love and empathy for one another, because that is the truest inheritance we can hand you.
Before we close, thank you — to every one of you who came out today and to those who could not be here. You chose to stand here together, as one community, and that matters more than you know. It is proof that twenty-five years haven't dulled how much these towns still care.
So today, from all our shore communities - we say their names in our hearts, we hold their families close, and we promise, twenty-five years on, exactly what we promised then.
We have not forgotten. We will not forget.
Thank you and go in Peace
