On Sept. 11, 2001, Sarah Miller Clark, a Washington, D.C., middle school teacher, left for Dulles International Airport to catch a flight to Los Angeles. Her fiancé, John Wesley, thought about going with her.
Clark was headed to an educational event in Santa Barbara, California, with 11-year-old student Asia Cotton. It was Wesley’s first day working on the HBO series “The Wire” as deputy communications director for Baltimore’s public housing agency.
Clark encouraged him to stay behind. She’d come home early.
“I don’t feel too good about this anyway,” she told him. “I’ll see you on Saturday.”
National tragedy, personal heartbreak
Clark and Asia boarded American Airlines Flight 77. Clark made the trip because National Geographic, the event’s sponsor, promised computers for her students.
They never reached California.
Hijackers crashed the plane into the Pentagon, killing all 64 people aboard and 125 inside.
Wesley was sent home from work after the attacks. He arrived at his Columbia, Maryland, home around 1 p.m. Soon afterward, a woman who had accompanied Clark to the airport called.
“She asked [if] I had talked to American Airlines,” Wesley recalled. “I said, ‘No, why?’ She said, ‘John, I think the plane that’s in the Pentagon was the flight Sarah was on.’”
Wesley called the airline. A representative began asking specific questions.
“Are you John Milton Wesley? You live in Columbia, Maryland, on Tamar Drive?” the representative asked before placing him on hold.
“At that moment is where I knew,” Wesley said.
He walked into the bathroom and picked up Clark’s toothbrush to see whether it was still wet.
“Fortunately, it was,” he said. “So I just sat there. I mean, I just sat there trying to grapple with this in my head.”
Courtship and commitment
The couple had known each other for years through church. Clark sometimes accompanied Wesley on piano when he sang at weddings. Eventually they became a couple.
They planned to marry April 4, 2002, but after several friends died unexpectedly, Clark decided they should not wait. They moved the wedding to Dec. 22, 2001.
Instead of preparing for a wedding, Wesley had to prepare for her memorial.
Days before the attacks, Clark told him that when her time came, she wanted music, a brief ceremony by her Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters and a service lasting no more than an hour.
“I remember saying to her, ‘Well, Sarah, let’s just get past the wedding first,’” Wesley said.
Eleven days later, he was searching for an urn for her remains.
Clark had taught school for nearly 30 years, and her final journey was made on behalf of her students. National Geographic provided the promised computers after her death.
She also poured energy into Wesley’s writing career, researching what literary managers did and advocating for him. She urged him to submit a piece about Emmett Till to The Washington Post. Wesley grew up in Rosedale, Mississippi, across the street from the white men who murdered Till in 1955.
“John, send the letter to The Washington Post,” Clark insisted.
The newspaper bought international rights to the expanded article.
For five years after Clark’s death, Wesley left the house largely as she had it. Her clothing remained where she had placed it. Her belongings stayed on tables.
When reporters called, Wesley shared positive stories about Clark — pieces of the woman beyond an airline passenger manifest and casualty count.
One favorite involved their aquarium. When Wesley fed the fish, they ate and continued swimming. When Clark fed them, they gathered at the glass.
Her secret? She knelt and placed her face close to the aquarium so the fish could see her eyes.
It was a small act, Wesley says, but it captured her gift for making contact — with students, with Wesley and apparently even with fish.
‘You rely on prayer’
After her death, Wesley returned to music and eventually released a recording of original songs.
“Once you have gone through the experience, you rely on prayer,” Wesley said. “If you have faith, once the moment has passed, God has you.”
Twenty-five years after 9/11, Clark is remembered among the nearly 3,000 people killed that day. She was a teacher who boarded a plane so her students could receive computers. She was a musician, a mentor, an advocate and a woman preparing to become a bride.
The wedding never happened. But the life Clark and Wesley shared did not disappear inside the Pentagon. It lives in his music, in the career she helped nurture and in every tender story he still tells.