BALTIMORE — In the days and weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the west side of the Pentagon at 530 mph, killing her husband and 183 others, Devora Wolk Pontell found herself lost in a fog of grief and shock.

Getting a new job helped. So did the support of colleagues, losing herself in her work at the Howard County State’s Attorney’s Office and, years later, marrying another good man. A quarter-century later, Devora Kirschner, as she’s now known, has such a busy life that the anguish of losing her first love, 26-year-old Navy Lt. Darin H. Pontell, in such a sudden, violent, strangely public way feels less like an open wound than a scar — usually painless, but still sensitive to the touch.

“I’m fine 99% of the time, but then I’ll hear a certain song on the radio, or someone will ask a question that calls to mind something I haven’t thought of in years, and it gets very difficult,” the 50-year-old prosecutor said, her voice trailing off in tears.

It has been 25 years since the terror attacks of 9/11 took the lives of nearly 3,000 people, including more than 2,700 in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon and 40 aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. An estimated 69 were Marylanders. More than three-quarters of those died at the Department of Defense headquarters just outside Washington.

It’s harder to count the secondary victims of 9/11 — the spouses, parents, children, siblings and friends who have had to absorb such a sudden, traumatic loss and find a way to keep living. About two-thirds have been able to process their grief in ways that allow them to lead psychologically healthy lives, according to one long-term study. Others have struggled.

But as Kirschner and other Marylanders whose loved ones died on 9/11 demonstrate, rebuilding a life has never meant leaving that morning entirely behind.

A room untouched

Basmattie Bishundat has “no idea” how her heart survived the death of her son, Romeo, whom she calls “my first love,” when Flight 77 struck the Pentagon 25 years ago.

“When I die, I’m sure my death certificate will say, ‘she died of a broken heart,'” said Bishundat, 68, of Waldorf.

She and her husband, Bhola, moved from Guyana to the U.S. when Kris Romeo Bishundat, their first child, was 2. Basmattie recalls that her outgoing, fun-loving son showed his reserved, hard-working family the art of enjoying life. “He taught us that,” she says.

After Basmattie persuaded him to join the Navy in 1995, Romeo flourished. An information systems technician, he won praise and commendations before reporting to the Pentagon in May 2001. He was killed four months later, four days from his 24th birthday.

For years, Basmattie rarely left home except when necessary. She withdrew from friends, kept Romeo’s room exactly as it was and left his Jeep untouched in the garage.

“I can’t even put it into words. I didn’t want to do anything,” she said.

Eleven years later, the Navy Gold Star program connected her with other mothers who had lost children. Becoming a grandmother helped, too. Slowly, Basmattie began making friends and going out.

“Romeo would be proud of me for enjoying my life,” she says.

The family still gathers for dinner on Romeo’s birthday. Grief can suddenly return: Last year’s Potomac midair collision, which killed 67, left her depressed for weeks.

“It’s like a rollercoaster; you never know who or what is going to happen. Sometimes the wind blows the wrong way. But I’m getting better as the years go by,” she said.

Rituals and the Redskins

Even after an event as shattering as 9/11, accepting the reality of a loved one’s death is an important step in grieving, said Stephen J. Cozza, a professor of psychiatry and associate director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda. Connecting with others who have suffered similar losses and memorializing loved ones can help survivors integrate grief into their lives, he said.

Keith Reuben chose that path early on.

His older brother, Todd, a successful 40-year-old lawyer, married father of three and avid sports fan who lived in Potomac, was aboard Flight 77. After the Pentagon Memorial opened, Keith volunteered as a docent for several years, inviting a different group of friends to join him every Sept. 11.

The ritual was one of many ways he kept Todd present. Keith and his mother, Carole, continued watching the anniversary ceremonies on television together even after she developed dementia. And whenever Keith used the family season tickets to attend a Redskins (now Commanders) game, including with Todd’s sons, Jeffrey and Jason, he thought of the brother who had shared his love of sports.

Over the years, though, Keith has also found himself thinking about experiences with Todd that never had the chance to happen. His son Zack is autistic and has special needs, and Keith has no doubt the older brother he admired would have been an important source of support.

Twenty-five years after Todd’s death, Keith prefers to focus less on how his brother died than on how he lived.

“You can’t dwell on the negative. It’s about celebrating his life,” he says.

The details of disaster

John Milton Wesley was at home in Columbia when he heard that two planes had hit the World Trade Center. He was horrified when word came that another had struck the Pentagon.

But he felt a measure of reassurance: His fiancée, Sarah M. Clark, had left for Dulles Airport at 5:30 that morning for a flight to California. The attacks were on the East Coast.

Then he learned that westbound Flight 77 had turned toward Washington.

“The first thing I did was walk into the bathroom and pick up her toothbrush. I wanted to see if it was still wet,” recalls Wesley, 77, a musician and spokesman for Baltimore’s Office of Equity and Civil Rights.

It was.

“Sarah walked out of the door on a beautiful day,” Wesley said of the 65-year-old elementary school teacher he was to marry that December. “She walked out the door and never came back.”

Clark, he says, connected instantly with people and animals. They took drives together, talking for hours. A devout churchgoer, she persuaded Wesley to return to church, where her friends embraced him and, after her death, helped sustain him.

Wesley did not shy away from the particulars of his loss. At an FBI reconstruction of the attack, he learned that two hijackers had sat directly behind Clark.

As investigators searched the Pentagon wreckage, Wesley stayed in close touch, hoping they would “find her fingers” — and with them her engagement ring.

They found it.

Investigators told Wesley they eventually recovered about 60% of Clark’s remains, along with her singed, water-soaked pink fanny pack, driver’s license and just the frames of her glasses. “That’s enough,” he told them.

“I keep them in a chest in my house,” he said. “Every now and then I look at them and hold them in my hand.”

Wesley had encountered history before. Growing up Black in Alabama, he delivered newspapers to Medgar Evers’ home and later performed at Memphis’ Lorraine Motel during the sanitation workers’ strike, days before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated there.

Friends call him a Forrest Gump of American history. Wesley, still writing and performing music at 77, believes God put him here to be “an observer.”

But what he most wants others to understand is something he learned the morning Sarah left.

“If I could just get everyone to know how important it is to value the people that you love, and not just your family,” he says. “We need to honor and cherish the people we are about. When you think about a friend, call them on the phone, man — you’ll never know if it’s the last time.”

‘Live for the moment’

The Pontell family knew something about sudden loss long before 9/11.

Steven Pontell, a Naval Academy graduate, was 23 when he was killed in a plane crash near Pensacola, Florida. Michael, the second of three brothers, was 22. Darin, who idolized Steven, was 13.

Twelve years later, Darin, a rising star in Naval intelligence and Devora’s husband of six months, was preparing to brief his superiors at the Pentagon when Flight 77 hit.

“I had a very difficult time trying to understand how or why someone was taking my brothers away,” remembers Michael, now 58, a federal employee who lives in Brookeville.

For years, he and his mother, Marilyn, leaned heavily on each other, spending long hours sitting together or talking about what they’d lost. Michael’s life kept changing, too. Divorced when Darin died, he remarried the following year and raised a family.

A natural extrovert, Michael also discovered that talking about his brothers helped keep them present. He keeps photos of the two in his bedroom, where he looks at them every day, and on his office walls, where visitors ask about the handsome young naval officers.

“It warms my heart to tell people how my brothers and I loved each other, what a close-knit family we had,” he said. “It’s a feeling of warmth and sharing.”

Michael no longer attends 9/11 commemorations as regularly as he once did. When he particularly misses Darin, he visits the 9/11 memorial at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Rockville and sits on a bench dedicated to his brother.

“Sometimes I tell people you don’t have to go to a church or a synagogue to pray,” he said. “Sometimes you feel closer in another sacred location.”

For his sister-in-law, Kirschner, the anniversary brings a complication familiar to many 9/11 families: One of the most private experiences imaginable — the death of someone you love — is also a public event.

“Instead of thinking about it when you want to, you have to decide whether to ignore the noise,” said Kirschner, who for years has avoided watching the evening news.

But her esteem for Darin remains — for how hard he worked, how often he helped others, and how, after Steven’s death, he advised others to “live for the moment because you never know how long it’s going to last.”

That, she said, is why she keeps telling his story.

“We lost good people on 9/11,” she said, and paused. “The biggest thing is not to forget.”

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