September 11 is also our birthday

Eugene K. Taylor Jr.

Lindsay Cadillac had baked her own 16th birthday cake, heart-shaped with white-and-pink frosting, and put it in the fridge the night before: September 10, 2001.

The next night, what was there to do? She held the cake up, her face stricken, as a big TV behind her replayed smoke billowing from the Twin Towers. Her father snapped a photo.

In 2006, she posted the photo to MySpace and to Facebook. A decade later, a friend took Cadillac’s post to Twitter. From there, other users picked it up and started making and spreading memes with it, until it had amassed millions of views across social media platforms.

My own family plans to cut into two cakes this September 11: one to celebrate my 22nd birthday, and another for my parents’ 24th wedding anniversary. They were married in South India, on a day the Hindu calendar declared to be auspicious. Two years later, I was born, on their wedding date and into a much larger and more somber coincidence.

Before 2001, September 11 was one of the more common birth dates in the United States, coming as it does near the annual late-summer surge in births. Now enough would-be parents avoid the date, when they have the choice of scheduling delivery, that the birth rate dips on the 11th.

Even so, there are plenty of us born on September 11, and plenty of other people who booked their weddings for the fine, sunny period right after Labor Day. What is it like to have your personal celebration tied to a day of national mourning? On Zoom, I brought together Cadillac and a group of people to talk about their experience with the fraught date and how it’s changed over the past 25 years.

Adsel Sparrow, who was born in 2001, wore a birthday crown to school while her teachers grappled with how to teach the infamous “9/11 lesson.” Many of those birthdays were spent watching archival news footage.

But even prior to receiving any formal education about the attacks, Sparrow knew September 11 was a “special day” because of how the tone of radio broadcasts would change on her birthday.

“Every other day it’d be happy news and music and then on my birthday it’d be like, ‘On this day 3,000 people died, and people lost their lives, and we’ve gone into a war, and it was the most depressing news,’” Sparrow said.

Courtesy Adsel Sparrow

Each year, Susan Ramage revisits what she was doing on September 11, 2001: shutting herself in her dorm room on her 18th birthday. Ramage’s family couldn’t get in touch with her brother, who worked in the Pentagon.

Fortunately, her brother had taken a vacation day, but the attacks weren’t so far away for Ramage, who lived about two hours outside Washington, DC. The anniversary still brings a “twinge of guilt and a dose of sadness” that she doesn’t expect will ever go away, she said.

Ramage stopped watching television on September 11 for a while.

“Depending on if we’re nearing a significant anniversary, a five-year, a 10-year, a 15-year, people amp it up a little more,” Ramage said. “They try and remember a little more, and then I feel like it does dampen the spirits even that much more.”

“It was constantly watching death on the day that we were born,” Cadillac said about watching the footage.

Rather than marking the occasion on September 11 itself, Ramage said she tends to celebrate her birthday on an adjacent day under the guise of a “scheduling conflict.” She has found it “awkward” to publicly celebrate, especially in the years that immediately followed the attacks.

“ It was a very weird experience to just be like, ‘Oh, I’m going to go get my first drink at 21, and then everybody’s talking about where they were on 9/11,’” Cadillac added.

“All of a sudden, the conversation turns from happy birthday to morbid, and not to be selfish when it’s your birthday, the conversation’s no longer about you, the birthday girl,” Sparrow said. “It’s shifted completely. While everyone deserves to be remembered and the day deserves to be remembered, it’s a little hard to be like, ‘Well, but this was my celebration.’”

It can be difficult to mark happy occasions on a day that is synonymous with a national tragedy, but some people have found ways to reclaim September 11 as a date that has personal meaning for them.

Sneha Dhandapani/CNN

Brian and Heather Rayburn, who were married in 1999, have been asked by friends, family and strangers to change their anniversary date dozens of times. A few years ago, Brian expressed that he was tired of it. The couple used to celebrate on September 10 and 12. This year, they decided to celebrate on September 10, 11 and 12, thus lengthening the celebration.

Anish Shrivastava was born in New Jersey on September 11, 2001. His uncle would have been at the World Trade Center if he hadn’t taken the day off for Shrivastava’s birth. “The day doesn’t just have to be about the tragedy that happened,” Shrivastava said. “It could also be about hope and coming together.”

A September 11 birthday supersedes your identity every time you take out a driver’s license or fill out a voter registration form.

The bouncer at my college bar would slap a hand over his chest while looking at my driver’s license and loudly proclaim, “Never forget!” Other times, especially in New York, a mention of my birthday is an unsolicited invitation for someone’s father’s “9/11 story.”

Those kinds of stories “blur together” for Cadillac. “I know that kind of sounds terrible, but at a certain point I have almost mental blinders up to the unsolicited trauma dumping. There is only so much of it you can take,” she wrote in a message after our group Zoom call.

Born on September 11, 2004, CNN’s Sneha Dhandapani always struggled to properly acknowledge her 9/11 birthday. So, ahead of this year’s anniversary, she decided to talk it all out with others all facing the same awkward problem.

We have all received 9/11-themed happy birthday texts over the past quarter-century: “Happy birthday, you weirdo. How dare you celebrate?” “Adsel crashed into the world as the Twin Towers crashed down.” “Happy birthday. Never forget.”

Like me, most of my friends have no memory of the September 11 attacks. But they’ve verbalized how they couldn’t forget my birthday because the date is in the headlines every year.

Ramage’s birthday was referred to as a “911 emergency” long before the attacks. The only response was to celebrate, and her friends have kept that going since 2001.

“Some of my friends are like, ‘It’s even more of an emergency now than it ever was, and we have to make sure that we still celebrate you and don’t lose you in the rest of it,’” Ramage said.

Our Zoom conversation ended with everyone sharing how we plan to celebrate our birthdays and anniversaries this year. The Rayburns will go whitewater rafting. Cadillac has booked a deep tissue massage with her husband. Sparrow will enjoy a pie this weekend (rhubarb, if she can find it). Shrivastava will host a small birthday dinner.

There’ll still be conversations surrounding the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and most of us anticipate a lot of shocked reactions from those learning when our birthdays and wedding anniversaries take place.

But the celebrations will continue. As Cadillac said, she’s learned to reclaim her birthday amid reminders of a tragedy.

“It’s my birthday. I still mattered.”

尤金·K·泰勒二世

林赛·凯迪拉克在 2001 年 9 月 10 日的前一天晚上，烤了一个心形的 16 岁生日蛋糕，上面有白色和粉色的糖霜，并把它放进了冰箱。

第二天晚上，她还能做什么呢？她举着蛋糕，脸上满是悲伤，身后的大电视屏幕上正循环播放着世贸双塔冒出的浓烟。她父亲拍下了这张照片。

2006年，她将这张照片发布到MySpace和Facebook上。十年后，一位朋友将卡迪拉克的帖子转发到了Twitter上。之后，其他用户纷纷转载，开始制作和传播相关的表情包，最终在各大社交媒体平台上获得了数百万的浏览量。

我家计划在今年9月11日切两个蛋糕：一个庆祝我的22岁生日，另一个庆祝我父母的24周年结婚纪念日。他们结婚于南印度，那天在印度教历中被认为是吉日。两年后，我出生了，恰好也是他们的结婚纪念日，但这却带来了一个更大也更令人感伤的巧合。

2001年以前，9月11日是美国比较常见的出生日期之一，因为它临近每年夏末的出生高峰期。如今，许多准父母会避开这一天（他们可以自由选择分娩日期），导致9月11日的出生率有所下降。

即便如此，我们当中仍有许多人出生于9月11日，也有许多人选择在劳动节后那段阳光明媚的日子举办婚礼。将个人庆典与全国哀悼日联系在一起，会是怎样的体验？在Zoom上，我召集了凯迪拉克公司和一群人，探讨他们与这个充满争议的日子之间的经历，以及过去25年来它发生了怎样的变化。

阿德塞尔·斯帕罗出生于2001年，在她生日那天，她戴着生日皇冠去上学，而她的老师们却在苦苦思索如何教授那堂臭名昭著的“9·11课程”。她的许多个生日都是在观看新闻档案片段中度过的。

但即便在接受任何关于袭击的正式教育之前，斯帕罗就知道 9 月 11 日是一个“特殊的日子”，因为在她生日那天，广播的语气会发生变化。

“其他日子都是令人高兴的新闻和音乐，但到了我生日那天，新闻却变成了‘今天有3000人死亡，人们失去了生命，我们卷入了一场战争’，这是最令人沮丧的消息，”斯帕罗说道。

图片由阿德塞尔·斯帕罗提供

每年，苏珊·拉马奇都会重温2001年9月11日那天她在做什么：在她18岁生日那天，她把自己关在宿舍里。拉马奇的家人联系不上在五角大楼工作的哥哥。

幸运的是，她的哥哥那天休假，但对住在华盛顿特区郊外约两小时车程的拉马奇来说，袭击事件发生地离她并不远。她说，周年纪念日至今仍让她感到“一丝愧疚和悲伤”，她觉得这种感觉永远不会消失。

9月11日之后，拉马奇有一段时间没看电视了。

“如果临近重要的周年纪念日，比如五周年、十周年、十五周年，人们就会更加热情地庆祝，”拉马奇说。“他们会努力记住更多，但我感觉这反而会更加打击大家的积极性。”

“在我们出生的那天，我一直在目睹死亡，”凯迪拉克在谈到观看录像时说道。

拉马奇说，她不会在9月11日当天庆祝生日，而是倾向于在相邻的某一天以“日程冲突”为由庆祝。她觉得公开庆祝生日“很尴尬”，尤其是在袭击事件发生后的几年里。

“这感觉很奇怪，就像是，‘哦，我21岁了，要去喝我的第一杯酒，然后大家都在谈论911事件发生时他们在哪里，’”凯迪拉克补充道。

“突然之间，谈话的内容就从祝你生日快乐变成了令人沮丧的话题。虽然过生日并非自私，但谈话的焦点不再是你，寿星本人，”斯帕罗说道。“气氛完全变了。虽然每个人都值得被铭记，生日也值得被铭记，但要说‘好吧，但这本来是我的生日’，还是有点难为情。”

在与国家悲剧同义的这一天庆祝快乐的日子可能很困难，但有些人找到了方法，让 9 月 11 日成为对他们具有个人意义的日子。

Sneha Dhandapani/CNN

布莱恩和希瑟·雷伯恩夫妇于1999年结婚，他们的朋友、家人甚至陌生人都曾无数次要求他们更改结婚纪念日。几年前，布莱恩表示他已经厌倦了。这对夫妇过去通常在9月10日和12日庆祝结婚纪念日。今年，他们决定在9月10日、11日和12日庆祝，延长庆祝活动。

阿尼什·什里瓦斯塔瓦于2001年9月11日出生于新泽西州。如果不是为了迎接他的出生而请假，他的叔叔本该在世贸中心遇难。“这一天不应该仅仅用来纪念那场悲剧，”什里瓦斯塔瓦说，“它也可以是充满希望和团结的日子。”

每次办理驾照或填写选民登记表时，9月11日出生的人的身份都会被取代。

我大学酒吧的保安会一边看着我的驾照一边拍拍胸口，大声喊道：“永远不要忘记！” 而在其他时候，尤其是在纽约，只要一提到我的生日，就会有人主动邀请我父亲讲述他“9/11 的故事”。

对凯迪拉克来说，这类故事“都混成一团”。“我知道这听起来很糟糕，但到了一定程度，我对那些不请自来的创伤倾泻几乎产生了一种精神上的盲点。你能承受的也就那么多，”她在我们小组Zoom通话后发来的信息中写道。

CNN记者斯内哈·丹达帕尼出生于2004年9月11日，她一直难以恰当地纪念自己的“9·11”生日。因此，在今年的周年纪念日到来之际，她决定与同样面临这种尴尬问题的其他人畅谈一番。

过去二十五年里，我们都收到过不少以“9·11”事件为主题的生日祝福短信：“生日快乐，你这个怪人。你怎么敢庆祝？”“阿德塞尔就像世贸双塔倒塌时一样闯入了世界。”“生日快乐。永远不要忘记。”

和我一样，我的大多数朋友对9·11事件都没有记忆。但他们都说过，他们不可能忘记我的生日，因为每年的新闻头条都会报道这一天。

早在911袭击事件发生之前，拉马奇的生日就被视为“紧急事件”。唯一的应对措施就是庆祝，她的朋友们从2001年起就一直延续着这个传统。

拉马奇说：“我的一些朋友说，‘现在情况比以往任何时候都更加紧急，我们必须确保我们仍然为你庆祝，不要在其他事情中把你遗忘。’”

我们的Zoom会议最后，大家分享了今年打算如何庆祝生日和纪念日。雷伯恩一家打算去漂流。卡迪拉克和她丈夫预约了深度按摩。斯帕罗这周末想吃个馅饼（如果能找到的话，她想吃大黄馅饼）。什里瓦斯塔瓦会举办一个小型生日晚宴。

9·11事件25周年纪念日仍会引发讨论，我们大多数人预计，当人们得知我们的生日和结婚纪念日是什么时候时，会感到非常震惊。

但庆祝活动还将继续。正如凯迪拉克所说，她已经学会了在悲剧的阴影下重新找回自己的生日。

“今天是我的生日。我依然很重要。”