I signed up with the 2996 Project, a tribute to the victims of 9/11. The idea was to get 2996 bloggers to volunteer, and to have each write a post devoted to one person who was killed by Islamist totalitarian terrorists on that day.

Name assignments were random, and I drew 46-year-old Glenn Wilkinson, one of the firefighters who answered the call to go to the burning World Trade Center to try to save lives, and who ended up losing their own.

Remembering the wonderful NY Times series “Portraits of Grief” that featured short, moving biographies of the victims, I searched at that website for Wilkinson. To my surprise, there was nothing about him. I had thought all the victims had been included, but it turns out that the Times only covered 1800.

There was, however, a little information about Wilkinson in a short article from Newsday, featuring this photo of Glenn, his wife Margaret, and their three children, taken a few years before 9/11:

The picture doesn’t say everything there is to say about Wilkinson’s life, of course. But I realized it still said an awful lot, and maybe it even shows the essence of his life. Because the two things that seem to have been most important to Wilkinson are there: firefighting and family.

Back when I was getting my degree in marriage and family therapy, I once did a project on how family photographs can reveal family dynamics. And now, as I looked at this photo, I couldn’t help but notice Wilkinson’s beaming face, his firefighter’s uniform, his evident pride in his brood, and the warmth and ease of the interactions between them. Yes, the little girl looks a little shy, but see how her father stands protectively and encouragingly over her.

Here’s the entire text of the Newsday article:

Fire Lt. Glenn Wilkinson had just ordered his company, Brooklyn’s Engine 238, out of the lobby of the crumbling World Trade Center’s Tower Two Tuesday morning when he took a roll call and discovered someone was missing.

“He was very, very loving,” Margaret said. “The thing he loved best in life was being a dad.”

You can see it in the photo, and hear it in his wife’s words.

And I think he must have loved his job, even though it was hard, very hard. That last day, it must have been exceptionally hard. But firefighters do that–they go against every instinct built into us to run, screaming, as fast as we can, away from burning buildings, not into them. And not only do they go into burning buildings, they go–as Wilkinson did–back into burning buildings, to save those as yet unaccounted for.

Wilkinson was only one of the 343 active and 3 retired firefighters who died on 9/11, by far the single most dreadful day in the history of a profession that has known its share of mass death and tragedy. Prior to 9/11, the highest death toll of firefighters in New York in a single incident had been twelve. And the total number of firefighters lost on 9/11 was greater than the total number of New York City firefighters who’d died on the job since WWII.

I recall hearing the news of the shockingly high number of firefighter deaths late in the afternoon of 9/11, after a day of ever-escalating horror. Even then, after we’d heard so much, the numbers seemed unbearable. It was unimaginable that so many firefighters had died at once; and yet it was sadly, and most terribly, true.

I wrote that Wilkinson was “only one” of the firefighters who died. But there’s really no “only” about it. Each and every one of them was a hero–an overused word, but an appropriate one in this case–a hero not only on that day, but on every day they came to work.