For a boy with a great future, the Key Bridge was his path of destiny

I glanced at mom. She was grinning. The Key Bridge, with its soaring arches and steel trusses, cast hope across her face. For years, my mother juggled two or three streams of income to support me and my sisters — everything from freelance writing to a brief stretch as a furrier’s assistant. But the spring after my 14th birthday, she got a new job at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, with a salary generous enough to end the juggling. We moved from New York to Maryland, and the Francis Scott Key Bridge welcomed us into our new lives.

We drove over the bridge and into the future. Now, that future is part of my past, and the bridge is gone.

A cargo ship nearly the length of the Eiffel Tower, as heavy as the Washington Monument, collided with a concrete pillar and knocked it down. More than 5,000 tons of roadway and girders plummeted into the dark water of the Patapsco River. Trusses the size of small houses crumpled on impact with the riverbed, folding into twisted wreckage. The boat ran aground. What remained of the bridge lay on top of it. Six Marylanders died.

To fully understand the tragedy of that day, you need to understand all of the days that came before it. The Key Bridge meant more than can be found in history textbooks or old photographs. It was a living part of the people of Baltimore. If you took a boat onto the Patapsco, you’d always dock under the bridge when you returned home. Our beloved port city lives in harmony with the water, and the bridge offered shade to boaters and fishing families on hot summer days. Afternoons would find parents and children casting for fish or luring crabs under the protection of the bridge’s sloped arches. Overhead, longshoremen and truckers came and went between their homes and their jobs, chasing opportunity just as my family chased a new start.

Before I took office, I was warned about the late-night calls — the dreams interrupted by a ringtone. But nothing could prepare me for the 2 a.m. call in which my chief of staff told me the bridge was down.

Pain mixed with disbelief. I had never known Baltimore without the bridge. When I rushed to the scene and saw the crumpled wreckage, I knew whatever loss I felt couldn’t compare with the suffering of the Marylanders whose loved ones had gone missing when the bridge fell.

Yet I experienced — and continue to experience — a kind of double consciousness. Maryland must mourn and move forward at the same time. We must rebuild even as we remember. And our shared sense of purpose belies a shared sense of pain that can’t be mended with executive orders or bipartisan bills.

What do you do when something you thought would last forever is suddenly gone? When lives are lost and memories lie at the bottom of the river? I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve started to find clues in the people of Maryland. While news stories have focused on legislation to replace the bridge and avoid mass layoffs at the Port of Baltimore, what you don’t read in the paper are the everyday acts of healing and hope that move our state forward. The teenager in Baltimore’s Cherry Hill neighborhood who told me about the day he got his driver’s license and drove over the bridge for the first time. The father who got his first job out of prison at the port and relied on the bridge to connect him to his own new start. The mother who lost her son in the collapse but found the strength to help me know the man he had been.

Memories will endure long after the wreckage has been fully cleared. And together, we won’t just memorialize the bridge — we will rebuild it. Someday soon, another family will cross the Patapsco to a new life in Baltimore, full of the hope and pride that my mother and I felt all those years ago.