While almost 3,000 lives were lost to unprecedented violence on Sept. 11, 2001, plenty of first breaths were taken that day, people who never lived in a pre-9/11 world.
Among them was a Cleveland woman who'll celebrate her 20th birthday on Saturday.
Tennessee Department of Health records show 306 babies were born on Sept. 11, 2001, and of those, 17 were born that day in Hamilton County.
One of the 144 girls born in Tennessee on 9/11 was Autumn Cordell.
"My mother told me she was watching it on the news while she was giving birth to me," Autumn Cordell said.
She was born about the same moment the first plane struck the World Trade Center's north tower.
Autumn Cordell didn't really make the connection between her birthday and the ominous 9/11 date until she was in elementary school, she said.
"They probably explained it to me when I was younger, but I probably didn't understand," she said.
But as she grew up, "every year on my birthday, we would go to school and watch videos on how it happened and what the significance of it was."
(Read more 9/11 20th anniversary coverage from the Times Free Press here)
Staff photo by Troy Stolt / Autumn Cordell poses for a portrait with her parents, Jeffery and Mitzi Frederick Cordell on Monday, Sept. 6, 2021, in McDonald, Tenn. Autumn Cordell was born Sept. 11, 2001, as the first hijacked plane struck the World Trade Center in New York City. On the same day almost 3,000 Americans were claimed in the attacks, the Cordells celebrated the arrival of a new life, their daughter.She said she was a middle-schooler before she really began to understand the universal impact of 9/11. It often changed the color and feel of her own special day.
"It was always hard going to school and every classroom you walked in, that's all they talked about that day," she said. "It does kind of put a damper on your parade."
Of course, Autumn Cordell acknowledges 9/11 and its impact and importance in the nation's history. She sometimes shares information about it on social media on her birthday, "but I don't really talk about it," she said.
"I try to separate the two because one's a tragedy and one's a new life," she said. "All those people and all those lives being taken away, then there's somebody else being born and coming into the earth."
She avoids feeling cheated or that she owes anything to the date.
"I'll live my life, day by day, one day at a time," she said. "Life is stressful enough."
That morning 20 years ago was a doubly confusing twist of emotions for her parents, Jeff Cordell and Mitzi Cordell. They could tell something was happening in the background 20 years ago today but their attention was also focused on the tiny life coming into the world at Women's East Pavilion in Chattanooga, they said.
"We were there really early that morning. She started going into labor at maybe 6 or 7," Autumn's father, Jeff Cordell, said.
The television was on in the delivery room and his new child arrived, he said, but no one seemed to be watching it closely at first.
"I just looked up and saw this TV show and it had live in the top corner - and I saw this airplane hit the building," he said.
"Then another plane hit the other building and I thought, 'Now wait a minute. Is this live? Is this actually happening?'" Jeff Cordell recalled.
But his attention was understandably drawn away. For the Cordells, it was a magical moment.
"We were paying attention to it but we were talking more about the baby," he said.
In the back of his mind, he was taking in the reality of what was playing out on the screen over the bed.
"Later on, I told them, 'This is not good,'" he recalled of his remarks on the attacks. "Even though we knew how bad it was out in the real world, we had a little angel here."
Mitzi Frederick Cordell was focused most on the arrival of her daughter that morning, but the attacks were impossible to ignore.
Moments after Autumn was born and the nurses stepped out of the room, one nurse returned and said, "You need to turn the TV on."
As a mother two very young boys and now a brand new daughter, nothing about the attacks was lost on her when she saw coverage of the first plane slamming into the north tower. When that was followed by the live view of the second plane hitting the south tower, right before her eyes, she knew her country was under attack.
"The happiness of having my first little girl went straight from happiness to fear and what the future would hold for my children," she said. "I couldn't believe I just brought a baby into the world and we were being attacked by terrorists."
She wanted to gather her young sons from her mother's house where she'd dropped them off on the way to the hospital.
"It was hard to take it in," she said. "It was hard to be excited about having a baby."
The worried mother said the next year went by without clearly making the connection to the date, but when Autumn's birthday and the first anniversary of the attacks came around in 2002, it was the start of a long run of learning to find joy on a date so closely linked with death.
Looking back now, Mitzi Cordell thinks 9/11 made her daughter quite unique.
"She's almost like she should have been born in the '70s era," she said. "She's like a flower child - very sweet-hearted and good-natured."
Contact Ben Benton at bbenton@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6569. Follow him on Twitter @BenBenton.