Twenty-five years on, one memory still cuts through for Rebecca Faulkner: how New Yorkers showed up for each other after 9/11.

Faulkner, managing director of the New York City office and an award-winning poet, wrote that on September 11, 2001, she was “newly married, newly graduated from an MA program at NYU, and was a London transplant, ready to claim Brooklyn as my true home.”

She said the attacks “changed my life, and the lives of all New Yorkers; transforming the city we loved and the ways we interacted with and supported our friends, neighbors, and the strangers we shared our subways and streets with.”

“In the days immediately following that unforgettable, devastatingly bright blue Tuesday morning, I watched my community come together,” Faulkner wrote, describing people “giving blood, organizing vigils for the families of the firefighters, plastering Union Square with flyers for the missing, and opening our homes to one another to talk, share and grieve.”

“We literally held each other up,” she wrote.

Faulkner said people who worked in Lower Manhattan returned to their offices “with tremendous trepidation.” At the time, she was working on “a unique, non-sectarian restoration project at the Eldridge Street synagogue, programming site-specific visual arts installations in the historic and tumble-down sanctuary.”

She said the project, which later led to the synagogue reopening as a museum, gave her “a tremendous sense of purpose: bringing a building back to life and imbuing it with new meaning.”

“It was there, in a landmark house of worship below Canal Street, that we persevered, opening to the public to enable people to gather and seek solace,” she wrote.

In the months after the attacks, Faulkner said she and her colleagues stopped once a week “to connect with one another, listen to music, drink tea, and sit, sometimes silently, and reflect.”

“I believe it was the combination of solidarity and fellowship and that got many of us through,” she wrote. “A time to laugh, a time to weep.”

Faulkner said that fall, “People came together, encouraged by the mayor to dine out and shop in Lower Manhattan.” She wrote that she and her friends “gathered more frequently, intentionally, and purposefully,” cooked together, traveled in groups and walked downtown before “eventually making our way to Ground Zero to pay our respects.”

She said community appeared “in remarkable ways in the wake of catastrophe,” including “the vigils and potlucks, the bravery and resilience.”

“But it’s also there in the small unspoken gestures that make us human,” Faulkner wrote. “A neighbor’s ‘Good morning, how are you today?’ A colleague walking you the last long block to the subway. That extra firm hug from a friend.”

“What was happening to our city and the world was devastating and extraordinary, but on the streets, in cafes and restaurants, in our homes and gathering places, we sought comfort in the ordinary and in each other,” she wrote. “Humanity is found in the everyday, chaotic noise of our lives. 9/11 showed us just that.”

Read more from Reasons to be Cheerful.