Love

By Lisa Bonos

“I don’t know if I’m going to be okay. I love you so much.”

“I just wanted to say how much I love you … and I’ll call you when I’m safe.”

The voice mails: There’s calm and confusion in those recordings, as people in the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon and on Flight 93 tried to reassure spouses and family members that they were okay — or that they would be. The “I love you”s telegraphed the true direness of the situation. The callers wanted to make sure they got one last chance to say it.

At the time, cellphones were newly ubiquitous — and so was the notion that a mass act of terrorism could unfold on U.S. soil. Not only did these voice mails become digital mementos for those who lost loved ones on 9/11, but they showed all of us the importance of ending a phone call with “I love you,” even when you weren’t calling from a burning building.

These farewell calls became a reminder that you might lose a loved one at any moment, explains Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and author of many books, including “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.” “The impact of hearing others end phone calls that way,” Tannen writes in an email, gives “the impression that it’s a common and good and maybe even expected thing to do.”

There’s no way to prove, of course, that 9/11 led more people to use the phrase “I love you.” And we might not be thinking of disaster while on a routine call with Mom, Dad, a sibling, a best friend or a spouse. But it was one of the first times Americans got such a visceral window into other people’s intimate conversations — and I believe that, for many of us, it left a mark.