“Melissa Doi, thirty two years old, called from the 83rd floor of the south tower. When the operator answered, Doi responded, ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ and continued, ‘there’s no one here yet and the floor’s completely engulfed. We are on the floor and we can’t breathe and it’s very, very hot.’ The operator tried to calm her down, but a few minutes later, Doi panicked: ‘I’m gong to die, aren’t I?’ she asked. ‘No no no,’ the operator replied. ‘I’m going to die,’ Doi repeated. ‘Say your prayers,’ the operator advised. ‘Oh God, it’s so hot. I’m burning up,’ Doi replied. Several minutes later, the line on her end went silent. And here’s the thing, really, in a way — one of the very few things we have to hold onto: the operator continued to speak to her for another 20 minutes, ‘soothingly, according to the Los Angeles Times article, ‘repeating Doi’s name over and over, calling her ‘dear.’

Holy Mary, mother of God. Say your prayers, ma’am. Oh God, it’s so hot, I’m burning up….

Oh, Osama bin Laden (and let’s remember there’s a little Osama bin Laden in the best of us), if you were sitting beside this beautiful young woman — because all young women are beautiful, all people are beautiful — if you could see the part in her hair, feel her breath on your hand, maybe you could have seen that if one of us is hurt, we’re all hurt. That whatever hurt has been done to you, this could never set it right. That it’s not making fire in the sky and blowing up towers that make you a man.

It’s love: the kind of love where you’d offer yourself up to be incinerated so that someone else wouldn’t have to be. The kind of love where you’d let yourself be nailed to a cross rather than order a brother to kill himself. The kind of love that says someone’s name into the darkness and the silence, over and over again, to say that Melissa Doi’s life, her death, were not in vain. Twenty minutes, over and over, into the darkness, the silence, into what I have to believe ascended to, was heard, echoed through the farthest reaches of the cosmos. Twenty minutes, over and over, one beating heart to another, through the sky above New York, through the heavens, through eternity, until one stopped beating — and the other kept calling out to her anyway.”

— from “Redeemed” by Heather King.