In The Cantos, Ezra Pound wrote:
What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.
This morning, as I was reading the last words of 9/11 victims, these verses suddenly came to mind, despite not having read The Cantos in years.
Perhaps it is because they articulate something that feels timeless and fundamental: that at our core, the defining pulse of humanity is love.
In the words of Tolstoy from War and Peace:
Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone.
As you will see below, in those final moments — trapped in the Twin Towers or aboard hijacked flights — there was only one thing they could hold onto…
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The 9/11 calls, preserved and shared by the families of the victims as living memorials, are an extraordinarily moving testament to the human spirit in the face of the brutality and evil of that day.
Moments after Flight 11 struck just a few floors below him at 8:46 a.m., Jim Gartenberg found shelter under a reception desk. From there, he called his wife, Jill, at her office on the Upper East Side, telling her how much she and their two-year-old daughter, Nicole, meant to him:
There’s a fire at work. I love you. Tell Nicole ‘I love you.’ I don’t know if I’m going to be OK. I love you so much.
At the time, Jill was three months pregnant with their second child.
On United Airlines Flight 93, 33-year-old flight attendant CeeCee Lyles called her husband Lorne from the back of the cabin after hijackers breached the cockpit and stabbed several passengers. Unable to reach him directly, she left this message:
Hi baby, you have to listen to me carefully. I’m on a plane that’s been hijacked. I’m calling from the plane. I want to tell you that I love you. Please tell my children that I love them very much and I’m so sorry baby. I hope to see your face again, baby. I love you.
From United Flight 175, former Navy pilot Brian Sweeney called his wife, Julie, before the plane’s tragic descent. Later that day, she discovered the following message on their answering machine:
In Kinderhook, New York, Anne Mulderry had just finished a yoga class near her retirement home when she stopped by the Post Office. Seeing a package, she mentioned she hoped it would be something fun. The clerk replied, "I hope so too on a day like this," and then told her about the attacks on the World Trade Center. Anne froze… her son Stephen worked there. She rushed home and found a message from him:
Mom, my building's been hit by a plane. And right now. I think I'm OK, I'm safe now but it's smoky. I just want to say how much I love you and I will call you when I'm safe. OK mom? Bye.
Melissa Harrington-Hughes was on a one-day business trip in New York City…
She tried to reach her husband at their home in San Francisco but it was early and he missed the call, so she left a voicemail:
Sean, it’s me. I just wanted to let you know I love you, and I’m stuck in this building in New York. A plane hit the building or a bomb went off, they don’t know. I just wanted you to know that I love you always.
What becomes clear after reading these words is that when we come face to face with death, the only thing that truly matters, the one thing we long to say, the thought that overwhelms everything else, is love. Not wealth, not accomplishments, not the hours we poured into work...
Only love, and the people we call family.
So many of us drift through life as if wrapped in a fog, caught in the monotony of routine, numbed by a rhythm that feels imposed rather than chosen. We move like sleepwalkers, bound by the weight of what we think we should be doing. And yet, it’s only when we truly grasp that our time is slipping away that the most beautiful part of us rises to the surface. Perhaps it’s because, when everything is stripped down to its essence, the noise disappears, and the thing that remains is love. It’s the purest truth of who we are, and the only weapon we’ve been given against evil.
This, I believe, is the greatest lesson they leave us: what seems to be the last thing standing was the only thing holding us up all along.
In the end, love is all that matters.
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Your words capture something profoundly true. In the face of death and tragedy, like the events of September 11, we are reminded with painful clarity of what really matters. Not the titles, the possessions, or the endless striving but the love we gave and the love we received. That day showed us both the cruelty of life and the incredible resilience of the human spirit. Families, friends, and even strangers held each other close, proving that love is the only force strong enough to outlast the darkness.
As the years pass, we continue to carry forward the legacy of those we lost by choosing to live with more compassion, more presence, and more love. Because in the end, as you said so beautifully, love is all that truly remains.
I read your article after reading news on corruption and crime and totalitarian repression and environmental destruction... I regret starting my day with those news, but thank you for helping me regain my center through your words.