During a visit to Ground Zero shortly after September 11, someone found a pretty wedding photo that had apparently been in one of the Twin Towers when they fell. That person passed it along to their friend, Elizabeth Stringer Keefe, a professor at Boston’s Lesley University, and she’s been trying to find an appropriate home for it since then.
“There’s so much beauty and happiness in the photo, and whatever relationship it had to 9/11, I wanted to care for it until I could return it to its owner. I hope this happens and there’s a happy ending,” she explained to ABC News.
After some local media attention this year, Keefe’s annual post went viral, showing up on Reddit and garnering over 74,000 retweets. Then, on Friday evening, there was this:
It turns out that Mahe is the blond guy on the left, and the photo was sitting on his desk on the 77th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower when the plane hit. Mahe, who never made it up to his office that day, told Keefe that everyone in the photo is alive and doing well, and she plans to return it to him in person the next time he’s in New York. (He has since moved to Colorado, where the wedding took place.)
It’s just a nice story! Sometimes it’s good to celebrate people for being the opposite of terrible.
