He did, DeFede wrote an Afterword that caught up on some of the people he’d written about twenty years ago.

He told how some people got home.

How some of the plane people had ended up with exactly the right people in Gander to help them through the aftermath.

How one planeload got lied to by the airline about where their resumed flight was going to go which was emphatically not home and after a chance remark by a ground crew member, some got off that plane with no idea what they were going to do next and let it take off without them: including the young parents bringing home an adopted baby who were afraid that turning back to Germany would mess up her visa and her ability to come home with them. Not taking that chance. Even if it meant being stranded on an island with a hurricane barreling at the ferry to the far-off mainland.

The cute couple: the man was in the military, which means he got sent to Afghanistan shortly after the attacks and then Iraq. Didn’t work out.

Quite a few of the people the author checked back in with wondered, without the former guy’s name or the virus’s ever being directly mentioned, whether we as a people here could come together for each other the way the people of Gander had for them. They hoped so, but right now it was hard to say.

I’m hoping that the book and the anniversary and the memories might spur us to remember that we did too, in those first few days. I saw it after the Loma Prieta earthquake, too. We can. We should. We must.