Virginia Buckingham has spent years coming to terms with how Sept. 11, 2001, changed her life. Twenty-five years later, she is still finding new meaning in what came afterward.
The Marblehead resident was running the Massachusetts Port Authority when two planes took off from Logan International Airport and were hijacked by terrorists who flew them into the World Trade Center. In the years that followed, Buckingham wrestled with guilt, shame and blame — an experience she chronicled in her memoir, “On My Watch.”
Now, with the release of an audiobook version narrated in her own voice, Buckingham is reflecting on how her understanding of resilience has evolved — how a person can be permanently changed by tragedy and still find a way back to themselves.
“I not only changed completely, but in an odd way, in a beautiful way, have returned to myself,” Buckingham said. “And so, how do you do both? How do you change because your heart and soul are shaped by what happens to you, and find your way back to the core of who you are, and that’s where I feel I am now.”
A career — and life — derailed
Buckingham was the first woman to serve as executive director and CEO of Massport, the agency that operates Logan. Before that, she had served as chief of staff to two consecutive Massachusetts governors.
She and her family had moved to Marblehead in 1997.
Then came Sept. 11, 2001.
American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 both departed Logan before being hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center towers. Buckingham quickly became a focus of criticism over security at the airport.
Six weeks after the attacks, Buckingham resigned. She faced intense criticism after Sept. 11.
Buckingham was later named personally in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by a victim’s family. The experience left her wrestling for years with guilt, shame and the question of whether she could somehow have prevented what happened.
Looking back now at the woman she was in 2001, Buckingham has a one-word response.
“Proud,” she said. “Really, really proud of her. I am so honored that I had the opportunity to work side by side with people at Logan who endured an unimaginable tragedy to rebuild, and I didn’t get to stay long. But while I was there, I feel very proud of the leadership I was able to provide and the the bond that was formed forever with my team.”
It took much longer to quiet the question of blame.
A turning point came in 2015, when Buckingham participated in a leadership program associated with former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. During a session examining a deadly friendly-fire incident in Iraq, the instructor asked participants who was to blame.
Buckingham wanted to flee from a question that sounded painfully familiar. Instead, she raised her hand.
“It’s not who; it’s what. It’s not a person; it’s a system,” she said.
“It was, I think, the first time I felt the courage of that conviction, and that I was able to silence those voices of blame and knew that it was true,” she said.
If she could sit beside her younger self on Sept. 11 and tell her what was coming, Buckingham knows what she would say.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “No matter what anyone says, even people that you deeply respect. It’s not your fault, and don’t let it take you out of your life for the next 15 years. Don’t let the trauma derail you.”
Finding a road back
Buckingham first published “On My Watch: A Memoir” six years ago. This June, she released an unabridged audiobook, narrated in her own voice, hoping to bring the story to a new audience.
She describes the purpose as “doing good with something bad” — using what she experienced after Sept. 11 to help others navigate painful experiences of their own.
Her ideas about resilience have become something of a roadmap.
The first step, she said, was regaining a sense of agency — understanding that the story belonged to her and that she could decide how to tell it.
“My story is mine, and I own it and deserve to tell it, and no one else can tell it,” Buckingham said. “No one else can define what it is. Only I can.”
That realization led to another: Something good could come from sharing what she had endured.
Faith became another part of the journey, although not in the form Buckingham once knew.
Raised Catholic, she said Sept. 11 shook her faith completely. Over time, she began exploring meditation, Reiki, Eastern practices and different ways of thinking about God and spirituality.
The lesson she eventually took from that search was simple: “We’re not alone. I’m not alone.”
“And so that gave me incredible strength and resilience to keep going,” she said.
Her children were another anchor.
“It was my children that saved me ultimately because I had that purpose of raising them and taking care of them and loving them,” Buckingham said. “And I had a very strong belief that they didn’t deserve to suffer because I was, and that was my guiding light.”
Faith, light, love and hope
Last year, Buckingham found an unexpected reflection of her own journey in St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan.
She had first visited the chapel in 2004, when it remained filled with reminders of Sept. 11 and the first responders who had rested and received care there after the attacks. When Buckingham returned in May 2025, most of those displays were gone.
At first, she was upset.
Then she noticed four stations around the chapel: faith, light, love and hope. A small collection of Sept. 11 artifacts remained, including a pew, badges and objects made from metal recovered at Ground Zero.
Buckingham began to see the transformation differently.
“Maybe like me, the chapel, which had been transformed by 9/11, has transformed again back to itself, and it doesn’t look like it looked before 9/11 either,” she said.
The chapel did not need to carry the entire burden of memorializing Sept. 11, she realized. The national memorial stood nearby. The chapel could again become a place of prayer while still carrying the memory of what had happened there.
For Buckingham, the parallel was unmistakable.
“I’ve been changed forever, and I’ve returned to myself,” she said. “And how lucky am I to be able to say that?”
‘Not one more second’
Resilience, Buckingham cautions, does not mean becoming impervious to pain.
“A lot of people mistake it for stoicism,” she said, or the idea that when something terrible happens, “you just deal with it and move on.”
Her experience has taught her otherwise.
She was reminded of that recently after recording an interview about Sept. 11. The conversation brought back the feelings of shame and blame so intensely that for about 24 hours she felt as though she had returned to where she was 25 years earlier.
She was teary. She snapped at family members. She even wondered whether talking about resilience made her a fraud.
Then, while driving home from Boston, something shifted.
“I’m not giving one more second of my joy to the doubters, to the questioners, the accusers, to my own doubts, my own shame,” Buckingham recalled thinking. “Not one more second. I’ve done it. I’ve done the work. I’ve understood what happened. I’m doing good with it. I’m not giving one more second of my joy away.”
“A weight lifted off my shoulders immediately,” she said.
Letting go
Buckingham, now 60, says she hopes to continue talking and writing about resilience. But as the country reaches the quarter-century anniversary of Sept. 11, she is less certain that she wants to continue telling the trauma portion of her story.
“I’d love to talk about the resilience roadmap,” she said. “I’m only 60 years old. I hope to have a lot of years of living ahead. So I hope to be able to build on the resilience story and share that more and let go of talking about the trauma story. Not that that story is gone, but I think I’ve said all I have to say about it.”
The passage of time itself is startling. Buckingham was pregnant with her daughter on Sept. 11. Today, an entire generation has grown up knowing the attacks only as history.
“It’s super weird,” she said. “It blows my mind even today because it doesn’t seem possible.”
Yet remembering remains important to her. Buckingham encourages travelers to thank Transportation Security Administration employees and to remember why the security measures that can sometimes feel burdensome exist.
“It’s been 25 years, and we can’t forget what happened,” she said. “Thank God it has not happened again, and in large part that’s due to the security measures that we’ve put in place in this country.”
For someone facing a tragedy of their own — an illness, loss, public failure or private pain — Buckingham believes resilience can be cultivated. It begins, she said, with self-love.
“Look at who you are, even if you have to pretend you’re across the room looking at yourself,” she said. “Try to see the reality of who you are, and start there.”
And then, she said, hold on to something.
For Buckingham, the lessons are embodied in the four stations she encountered at St. Paul’s Chapel: faith, light, love and hope.
“Those are the four basics of human existence,” she said. “And if you can apply those to anything that happens, you’ll be OK.”
