The one photograph that stopped me in my tracks and depicted both the horror and the humanity of 9/11 was Photographer Shannon Stapleton’s incredibly powerful and deeply moving picture of Fr.Mychal Judge, the FDNY Chaplain, being carried from the rubble of the Towers by a group of First Responders and a civilian who had rushed to help. The picture summed up for me the collective power of the best of humanity working together in the middle of a literal hellscape.

I kept that newspaper photo in a box under the bed for years and every year on 9/11 I would look at it to remind myself of what had happened that day.

Then on 9/11 in 2006 as I looked at the photograph I began a conversation with the “man in the chair “ and the result was The Sky Belongs to Dreamers.  It is a simple heartfelt conversation with Fr.Mychal and it’s exactly what I would say to him today if he were here in front of me and I wish he was, along with his brothers and sisters from the FDNY and related First Responders.

So until the opportunity comes to have that conversation, sleep well and dream Mychal along with your fellow First Responders and brothers and as we say in Ireland, as Gaeilge (in Irish) “Beidh lá eile againn (We’ll have another day). 

Dave McGilton, September 2026