Remembering 9/11: The Day Palma Fell Silent

Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, Michel Euesden remembers an afternoon in Palma when football, laughter and excitement suddenly gave way to fear — and the overwhelming need to get home to the people we loved.

Some days I walk into the kitchen with all the confidence of a woman on a mission, only to discover that neither of us knows what the mission is.

Me or the kitchen.

But 11 September 2001? I remember it with a clarity that still makes my chest tighten.

Palma, Mallorca: 11 September 2001

We were living in Mallorca at the time, having just launched the newspaper there. That afternoon, Mum and Dad were with us in Palma, although Mr E’s attention was firmly on another cherished institution.

Arsenal were on the island.

They were playing Real Mallorca that evening. As far as he was concerned, this was practically a royal visit.

Possibly more important. Royalty rarely scored away from home.

A devoted Arsenal supporter, he was skipping around like a six-year-old beside the Christmas tree. Had someone wrapped the team in a bow and delivered them personally, he could hardly have been more delighted.

Every bar seemed to be spilling English football fans onto the pavement. Everywhere you turned there was laughter, singing and football analysis being delivered with the authority usually reserved for brain surgeons.

Palma was electric, and we were right in the middle of it.

That is what I remember first.

The elation. The anticipation. The excitement. The pure joy radiating from Mr E and spilling into the streets around us.

Because I remember so vividly what replaced it.

The Moment the Streets Fell Silent

Suddenly, shouting broke out in Spanish. A man pushed past us, frantic. What I remember of his words was terrifying.

“¡Joder! ¡Se está acabando el mundo! ¡Tengo que volver a casa con mi familia! ¡Ahora!”

Then we heard it again, this time in English.

“The world is ending!”

The words reverberated around our brains. The world is ending. How could the world be ending when, just moments before, we had been standing in the middle of so much elation?

People were rushing past, pushing us aside in their desperation to get somewhere. Home, perhaps. To someone they loved.

The English fans, who only moments earlier had seemed capable of supplying the soundtrack to the whole island, had fallen silent.

Something dreadful was happening, and we did not yet understand what.

Fear arrived before the explanation.

It seemed to move through the crowd until it reached every one of us. The atmosphere changed so completely that the street felt unfamiliar, although we were standing in exactly the same place.

Then an Englishman shouted the words I can still hear.

“They’ve attacked America. The towers have crumbled.”

America?

The towers?

Your mind does something strange when it is handed information it cannot bear. You hear the words. You understand each one individually. But you cannot make them belong together.

Uncontrollable sobs escaped from us both.

Then we reached for my bewildered mum and dad, pulling them close, trying to gather our little family together while something unimaginable unfolded thousands of miles away.

Only my little family was not all there.

My son was on the mainland, at school.

I picked up my phone and rang. I needed to know he was safe. I asked his dad to keep him safe until I could get a flight over.

As though saying it could guarantee it.

As though a mother’s instruction could stand guard at the door and refuse to let the world in.

I had no idea when I would be able to reach him. In that moment, the stretch of water between Mallorca and the mainland felt unbearably wide.

How 9/11 Changed the Way We Travel

Until then, getting on a plane had seemed such an ordinary answer to distance.

That afternoon, even the thought of flying felt different.

We could not yet know how profoundly travel would change. How security would tighten, how procedures would be rewritten and how further threats would bring further restrictions in the years that followed. The vigilance we encounter at airports today grew out of a world forced to confront what passenger aircraft could be made to do.

The terrorists had taken something from people who had never even boarded those planes: the ordinary confidence that we would arrive.

But standing in Palma, I was not thinking about the future of aviation.

I wanted my child.

And I understood the man who had pushed past us.

“I must get home to my family.”

Across different languages, countries and lives, so many of us were reaching for the same thing. A familiar voice. An answered telephone. Someone saying, “I’m here.”

Remembering the Families, 25 Years After 9/11

Twenty-five years later, I still remember the noise in Palma.

And then the silence.

But my memory of that afternoon comes with something I must never overlook: I could hold the people beside me. I could make that call.

For so many families, the voice they needed to hear never answered again.

How do you find words large enough for that?

For the person who went to work and never came home. The passenger whose journey ended in terror. The rescuers who went towards danger because somebody needed them.

For the families left to endure the waiting, and then the knowing.

I cannot pretend to understand the full weight of their grief. I think of the birthdays, the empty places at family tables, the ordinary evenings when something happens and, for a second, you want to tell the person who is no longer there.

I think of children growing up with photographs where there should have been a parent.

Of parents who had to bury their children.

Of the devoted wife who would never hold her soulmate again. Never hear his voice calling from another room. Never breathe in his aftershave, lingering long after he had left it.

Of the day she realised that familiar scent had faded, and she could do nothing to bring it back.

Of all the love that had nowhere familiar to go.

They deserve to be remembered as people, with personalities, plans and people waiting for them at home.

Where Were You on September 11?

Can you remember where you were on 9/11? What you were doing when you heard? Who you reached for first?

I can.

I remember a happy man waiting to watch Arsenal. My mum and dad beside us. A street full of life.

And a stranger desperate to get home.

We must keep telling these stories. We must teach those who were not yet born why this date carries such sorrow, and honour the lives behind it.

Our remembrance must be worthy of that difference.