How the tragic distinction of losing the most people on 9/11 brought one World Trade Center firm closer together

It’s a distinction no one wants.Cantor Fitzgerald lost more loved ones on 9/11 than any other organization.The firm’s offices occupied the 101st through 105th floors of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, above where American Airlines Flight 11 struck at 8:46 a.m.

Of Cantor’s 960 New York workers, 658 died, along with 50 contractors and visitors.Another 61 were lost at Euro Brokers, which is now part of Cantor.Every number was a person.

Every person had a family.Every family has a story worth remembering.

Edie is a Cantor family member.Her office was on the 101st floor, but she wasn’t there that morning.

Her brother Gary died on the 104th floor.Her other brother, Howard, then Cantor Fitzgerald’s Chairman and CEO, was spared because he was taking his son to the first day of kindergarten.On Sept.

14, 2001, Edie and Howard co-founded the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund to help the victims’ relatives rebuild their lives.Many were strangers.

They became family.Caroline joined Cantor Fitzgerald in 2002.At the firm’s annual Charity Day, which raises money for hundreds of charities around the world and disaster relief efforts, she would ask the movie stars, athletes and colleagues who attended: “Where were you on September 11?”Early replies mirrored her own experiences, as people were headed for work or school drop-off.

But with the passing years, the answers changed: high-school chemistry, middle-school homeroom, first grade.Then the inevitable.

“I wasn’t born yet,” said a twentysomething actor.Soon, we had memorial volunteers with no firsthand memory of the attacks.Each September 11, we say “Always remember.” Many post #NeverForget.

But the painful truth is that memory fades.Edie thought back to laying out Cantor’s names with meaningful adjacencies for the National September 11 Memorial.She used to know every name of the lost; 25 years later, those names can be harder to summon.

If our own memories were fading, what would a genera...