Overview:
The attacks of Sept. 11 took Sarah Miller Clark before she could marry the man she loved. Twenty-five years later, John Wesley has made remembering her life — not just her death — an act of devotion.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Sarah Miller Clark, a middle school teacher in Washington, D.C., left for Dulles International Airport just outside the city to catch an early 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 a student, 11-year-old Asia Cotton. It was Wesley’s first day working on the HBO series “The Wire” as deputy director of communications 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 for the cross-country flight. Clark had agreed to make the trip because National Geographic, the organization sponsoring the event, promised to provide computers for the students in her classroom.
She and Cotton never reached California.
Hijackers seized the plane and crashed it into the Pentagon, killing all 64 people aboard and 125 people inside the building. He didn’t know it then, but the breaking news unfolding across the country was about to become heartbreakingly personal for Wesley.
After the attacks in New York and reports of other possible threats, Wesley was instructed to send his staff home. He arrived at his Columbia, Maryland, home around 1 p.m. Soon afterward, he received a call from a woman who had accompanied Clark to the airport.
“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. When a representative answered, the questions became increasingly specific.
“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.
Once you have gone through the experience, you rely on prayer. If you have faith, once the moment has passed, God has you.
John Milton Wesley, fiancÉe of Sarah Miller Clark, 9/11 Victim
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 their church in Columbia. Clark sometimes accompanied Wesley on piano when he sang at weddings. Their friendship eventually deepened, and seven years before her death, they became a couple.
They planned to marry on April 4, 2002. But after several friends died unexpectedly, Clark reconsidered the long engagement. While the couple was on vacation, she told Wesley she did not believe they should wait. Together they moved the wedding date to Dec. 22, 2001.
They had come home ready to prepare for a wedding. Instead, Wesley had to prepare for her memorial.
Only days before the attacks, the couple attended a friend’s four-hour funeral. As they stood near the urn, 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, but her care extended beyond classroom instruction. Even her final journey was made on behalf of her students. National Geographic fulfilled its commitment after her death and provided the promised computers.
She also poured her energy into Wesley’s writing career. Although she was an educator, she researched what literary managers did and began advocating for him. When she learned his publishers had never sent him on a book tour, she contacted them. Soon Wesley was traveling on East and West Coast tours.
Remembering Emmett Till
Clark also urged him to submit a piece about Emmett Till to The Washington Post. Wesley had grown up in Rosedale, Mississippi, across the street from the white men who murdered the 14-year-old Till in August 1955. He says he initially wrote the piece as a letter suggesting that the newspaper recognize the 50th anniversary of Till’s death.
“John, send the letter to The Washington Post,” Clark insisted.
The newspaper bought international rights to the expanded article, and Wesley’s work reached readers worldwide. Clark would not live to see that particular success, but Wesley knew her encouragement had helped make it possible.
In the years following her death, grief became both ritual and remembrance. Wesley left the house largely as Clark had it for five years. Her clothing remained where she had placed it. Her belongings stayed on tables. He burned candles at his prayer table so often that the smoke from the flame gradually darkened the yellow walls.
Yet he made a deliberate decision about how he would speak of her. Each time a reporter called, he says, he shared another positive story — another piece of the woman beyond the airline’s passenger manifest and casualty count.
One of his favorites involved their aquarium. When Wesley fed the fish, they ate and continued swimming. When Clark fed them, they gathered at the glass.
She explained 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 also returned to music. He began with four songs and limited piano skills. Nine years later, he released a recording of original music that reached listeners internationally.
Faith, he said, made it possible for him to tell Clark’s story without being shattered each time.
“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, Sarah Miller 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.
