BRANE ENGEL

She was 27 years old. Twenty-seven. An age when you are supposed to be planning what comes next, not making peace with the end. Her name was Honor Elizabeth Wainio. Everyone called her Lizz. And on September 11, 2001, in the final minutes of her life, Lizz did something almost incomprehensible. She tried to comfort everyone else. Just two days earlier, she had been in Paris. She had walked the Champs-Élysées. She had attended a friend’s wedding in Florence. She had stepped inside a church and lit a candle for her grandmother. She once told her mother that if she ever got to see Paris, she could die happy. She had no idea how haunting those words would become. On September 11, Lizz boarded United Airlines Flight 93 in Newark, headed for San Francisco. She had a career. People who loved her. Plans waiting for her on the other side of that flight. Then, at 9:28 that morning, everything changed. The cockpit was overtaken. The aircraft plunged. Passengers were forced toward the rear. Then the people aboard Flight 93 began making phone calls. And they learned the truth. Other aircraft had struck the World Trade Center. Another had struck the Pentagon. Suddenly these ordinary Americans understood something terrifying. Nobody was coming to negotiate their way out of this. Their airplane itself was the weapon. Someone handed Lizz a phone and told her: “Call someone you love.” Think about that sentence. Not call the police. Not call your employer. Not call somebody who can fix this. Call someone you love. Because time was disappearing. Lizz called her stepmother, Esther. And somehow, with everything happening around her, this 27-year-old woman turned her attention away from herself. She said: “This is going to be so much harder for you than it is for me.” That sentence wrecks me. Because imagine the love required to stare directly into your own final moments and think first about the people who will have to wake up tomorrow without you. Lizz wasn’t asking to be comforted. She was comforting them. She told Esther: “I’m gonna be with Grandma.” The same grandmother for whom she had lit a candle in Europe only days earlier. There is something almost numinous about that. Then, aboard Flight 93, ordinary people began doing something extraordinary. They understood what was happening. They understood what the hijackers intended. And they made a decision. If they could not save themselves, they might still save people they would never meet. Parents. Children. Secretaries. Police officers. Tourists. People walking through Washington who would never know the names of the strangers fighting for them thousands of feet above Pennsylvania. Flight attendant Sandra Bradshaw told her husband she was preparing boiling water. Todd Beamer prayed the Lord’s Prayer. Then came the words America would remember: “Let’s roll.” These were not soldiers boarding that airplane that morning. They were ordinary Americans. They had luggage. Appointments. Families. Wedding memories. Vacations. Coffee cups. Plans for Wednesday. And suddenly history placed an impossible burden upon them. They carried it anyway. Lizz returned to the phone one final time. “They’re getting ready to break into the cockpit. I have to go. I love you. Good-bye.” Read those words slowly. “I have to go.” She knew where she was going. She knew what those passengers were preparing to do. And still: “I love you.” At 10:03 a.m., Flight 93 came down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It never reached Washington. Forty passengers and crew did not come home. But countless other Americans did. That distinction matters. Today, at the Flight 93 National Memorial, the Tower of Voices contains 40 wind chimes. Forty individual voices. Forty human beings. Not statistics. Not merely names carved into stone. Sons. Daughters. Mothers. Fathers. Husbands. Wives. Friends.