Rest in Peace Mary Jane.....
On 9/11/2001, a town of 13,000 people in a Canadian town called Gander took in 6,700 stranded airline passengers. They opened their homes and hearts to complete strangers, in their most painful hour. That's what Canada does. 
She survived 9/11, then began a life of healing others
“I must become a nurse,” Jocelyn Brooks recalled thinking. “I’m getting a chance, and I am going to do it.”
By Kyle Melnick
Jocelyn Brooks had escaped the World Trade Center — through 40 desperate stories of stairs, thick black smoke and dismembered body parts — when she looked toward the clear sky and realized she made it out alive.
People trapped inside New York City’s twin towers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were jumping from windows, trying to flee the greedy flames and instead falling to their deaths. In a clarifying moment, Brooks had two thoughts: She needed to watch her two children become adults, and she needed to pursue her childhood dream of working in medicine.
Surviving seemed like the hand of fate, she said, and she wasn’t going to waste it.
“I must become a nurse,” Brooks recalled thinking. “I’m getting a chance, and I am going to do it.”
It took about a decade of determination, but Brooks eventually graduated from nursing school and now works as a clinical nurse at a cancer center. She said surviving 9/11 guided her toward her purpose, following in the footsteps of her mother, who helped her and her 11 siblings when they were sick as children.
“I want to hold somebody’s hands when they’re crying and when they’re at their lowest because I survived,” Brooks, 61, told The Washington Post. “I walked out of that building. It could’ve been different. I am healthy, and I am thankful, and I will continue to have an attitude of gratitude.”
Growing up, Brooks said, her family couldn’t afford health care in Trinidad and Tobago, so her mother, Irene Woods, served as their makeshift doctor. She made tea with herbs to help with fevers and applied antiseptics to wounds. Brooks served as her mom’s assistant, sitting by her to hand her scissors, tape, gauze and rubbing alcohol.
That sparked Brooks’s interest in medicine, but when she moved to Brooklyn in 1986, she couldn’t afford medical school. She began working for an investment bank as a research assistant.
She still dreamed of working in medicine one day. Brooks’s children, Zyxmaa Niles and Randy Brooks, called her “Red Cross” because she always was helping others. Niles drew her mom wearing a white and red nursing cap in the mid-1990s — a drawing Brooks hung at her cubicle.
But with a steady job and children to raise, Brooks didn’t make immediate plans to attend nursing school until after 9/11.
Irene Woods, left, and Jocelyn Brooks in New York in the 1990s. (Jocelyn Brooks)
About an hour after arriving at her cubicle on the North Tower’s 40th floor that morning, Brooks heard a loud crash and the building shook. Debris fell outside a window. She recalled turning to a colleague and saying “This is it,” thinking she was about to die.
Brooks left her backpack, wallet and cellphone behind as she ran to the staircase, which was overcrowded with people descending and firefighters ascending. One woman stopped and shouted “I can’t breathe,” Brooks said, so Brooks thumped on her chest for about a minute and told her “breathe” until she calmed down.
Brooks saw dead bodies in the promenade between the towers before watching people leap from windows. Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks. Brooks escaped the area by running on the West Side Highway before riding the subway to her sister’s house in Brooklyn. She spent the rest of the day connecting with family members who didn’t know if she had survived.
In the following years, speeding cars and the sound of sirens reminded Brooks of the panic of that day. But those moments also made her reflect.
“I took a long look at my life, and I said, ‘What if I had not lived?’” Brooks said. “I would not have gotten a chance to really follow my dreams.”
Brooks earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Long Island University in 2004. When a bank took over the investment bank Brooks worked at in 2008, she saw the turnover as an opportunity to leave and return to Long Island University for a nursing degree.
Her boss told her to consider her decision to leave for two weeks, Brooks said, but Brooks had long known what she wanted.
Jocelyn Brooks is still working as a nurse at 61. (Jocelyn Brooks)
Brooks began working as a nurse after she graduated in 2012. She has enjoyed sitting with patients who don’t have family in the area. She recalled telling one patient a few years ago: “I know your mom is not here today, but remember, you’re not alone. I’m here.” She said watching her patients’ health improve is “so rewarding.”
Since she started working at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2018, Brooks has traded stories with patients who have developed cancer as a result of inhaling toxins at the World Trade Center during or after the attacks.
“She just has such a gentle, caring way about her that I’ve never seen in any other nurse,” said Brooks’s colleague, Rachel Lemmey.
On busy mornings when many nurses are overwhelmed, Lemmey said, Brooks is enthusiastic and gives a pep talk that Lemmey recites back to herself.
“We’re going to get through the day together,” Brooks said she tells her colleagues. “And it’s going to be a great day.”
9/11 ANNIVERSARY NYC 2025
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