Michael Iken’s widow keeps his memory alive 25 years after 9/11

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Michael Iken left his Riverdale home unusually happy.

He had woken early for the last of a series of sailing classes, something his wife, Monica Iken-Murphy, remembered him eagerly anticipating. He slipped on a pair of brown moccasins, told her he loved her and headed downtown, where the 37-year-old stockbroker worked on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center.

“He was so excited,” Iken-Murphy recalled. “He was like, ‘I love you. I’ll see you later.’”

They had been married less than a year. The couple wed in October 2000 and were trying to start a family. They had also begun imagining a longer life in Riverdale, where both had landed almost by accident. Iken-Murphey had been teaching in the South Bronx and staying with her best friend in the neighborhood, while Iken had been living nearby with his own best friend.

Only three days before the attacks, Iken had turned 37. Iken-Murphy remembered celebrating his birthday by staying awake until sunrise with a friend near the Metro-North tracks. Iken loved sunrises, and as they watched that one, he talked about how happy he was and how much he wanted to become a dad.

“I’m so in love, I’m so happy, I want to be a father,” she remembered him saying.

That Tuesday morning, after the first plane struck the World Trade Center, Iken called her from work. His voice, she said, was strikingly calm.

“Monica, everything’s fine,” she recalled him telling her. “Everything’s under control.”

Workers had been told to remain where they were, he said. He called again shortly afterward, asking her to start contacting relatives and friends because so many people were trying to reach him.

Then came the last words she would ever hear from him:

“People are jumping out of windows. I got to go.”

Iken-Murphy ran toward the television with a phone in one hand and the family phone book in the other. As she watched, she saw the second plane approaching the World Trade Center.

“I couldn’t register what I was watching,” she said. “Like, that can’t be happening. Like, I am not seeing that.”

She called Iken, but the lines were busy. He never came home.

Iken-Murphy said some part of her knew almost immediately that he was gone. Still, she registered him as missing, provided his toothbrush and razor to aid in identification and continued searching.

“I was not gonna give up on him,” she said.

His remains have never been identified, an absence that has shaped the way Iken-Murphy has carried him through the 25 years since. Without remains to bury, she said she sometimes allows herself to imagine Iken “wandering the planet,” whole and safe. She still talks to him every day.

“For me, it’s 9/11 if I think about Michael,” she said. “You can’t separate the two.”

Within months of the attacks, Iken-Murphy began turning her grief toward ensuring that what happened, and the people killed, would not disappear from public memory. In January 2002, she founded September’s Mission, which became part of her yearslong advocacy for a permanent memorial at the World Trade Center site.

Once that effort was realized, Iken-Murphy expanded the organization’s mission to include mental health and education. A former teacher, she also serves on the National September 11 Memorial & Museum’s education committee and has spoken to students about the attacks.

That work has taken on new urgency for her as Sept. 11 moves further from living memory. An entire generation of children now knows the attacks only as history, making education central to what Iken-Murphy sees as the next stage of preserving its legacy.

“You have to know your child and know what you can tell them,” she said, arguing that younger students should be introduced to the subject gradually and in age-appropriate ways.

For Iken-Murphy, one of the most effective tools is the memorial itself.

“You can’t explain the memorial unless you physically put your feet there,” she said. “It’s a powerful place.”

On the 20th anniversary in 2021, Iken-Murphy returned there wearing her wedding dress, honoring what she remembered as one of Iken’s happiest days.

Now, on the 25th anniversary, her attention is increasingly on what remains after those who personally remember Sept. 11 are gone.

“When I leave this planet,” she said, “I know his memory is solidified.”