His pager continually going off, Fire Director Pat Boyle finally canceled his 9 a.m. class at New Jersey City University on the morning of September 11, 2001, and when Jason O’Donnell went back home to Bayonne, he listened to the news on 1010 Wins.

Then he looked to his left and saw the huge, second trail of smoke emanating from the World Trade Center.

The great-grandson of a local cop killed in the line of duty when his horse threw him on a rock pile, O’Donnell – now 46 – had been a Bayonne firefighter since 1995, and with New York and New Jersey in shock, he and all area first response personnel awaited the inevitable call. O’Donnell owned a bar at the time and he walked down there. In the aftermath of the terror attacks, the boulevard leading to the bridge looked like a parking lot. “We made whatever food and served the people coming in from New York. It was quietest 100 people that were ever in a bar,” he recalled.

On September 13, he got the call and boarded a tugboat to Staten Island. Then he rode the ferry to Lower Manhattan. He walked up Broadway to the area where the World Trade Center had stood. “It was just desolately barren other than national guardsman,” he recalled. He worked all day into the night,  secondary minor collapses constantly putting everyone on high alert. One of those finally cleared the area that night. O’Donnell wound up in Jersey City. He went back on 9/14 and spent another 12 hours on the bucket brigade, part of a human chain of cops and firefighters, passing bucket after dust-filled bucket. There were no pieces of furniture. No computers. Just steel, concrete, and dust.

Then every half hour or 45 minutes everyone would again get very quiet.

“I didn’t go back after that,” O’Donnell said. “At a certain point, you knew it was just recovery. On 9/15, it was time to let the NYFD guys do what they had to do.”

He’ll never forget, of course, the feeling of irrevocable interruption on that beautiful September day, the size of the incident, the horror of human life lost, and the days after. O’Donnell grew up in the shadow of the World Trade Center. He could see the magnificent twin towers from his window as a kid. He worked in the financial center, taking the train in there for two years to clerk at the Industrial Bank of Japan. People from Bayonne worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and died on 9/11.

He would go on to complete over 20 years as a firefighter, the job overlapping toward the end with his time in the legislature as an assemblyman, consisting of countless calls – every one of them a chance to help people – and he would have a family, and he would proudly see his daughter grow and this month send her off to freshman year of high school, and he would always think about the sacrifices of his grandfather’s generation in WWII, the three O’Donnell brothers who went to war, one of whom didn’t make it back, and he thought about his father the local electrician whom he loved, who never would have guessed his kid would be an assemblyman someday, who died at the age O’Donnell is now; and there’s a lot left, much work to be done, all of life a building somehow out of what went before, an improvement and refinement, an unforgettable and never ending reckoning, and he would never forget the day and the numbing, hope and heartbreak-weighed days after.