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(CNN) — Lindsay Cadillac had baked her own 16th birthday cake, heart-shaped with white-and-pink frosting, and put it in the fridge the night before: September 10, 2001.

The next night, what was there to do? She held the cake up, her face stricken, as a big TV behind her replayed smoke billowing from the Twin Towers. Her father snapped a photo.

In 2006, she posted the photo to MySpace and to Facebook. A decade later, a friend took Cadillac’s post to Twitter. From there, other users picked it up and started making and spreading memes with it, until it had amassed millions of views across social media platforms.

My own family plans to cut into two cakes this September 11: one to celebrate my 22nd birthday, and another for my parents’ 24th wedding anniversary. They were married in South India, on a day the Hindu calendar declared to be auspicious. Two years later, I was born, on their wedding date and into a much larger and more somber coincidence.

Before 2001, September 11 was one of the more common birth dates in the United States, coming as it does near the annual late-summer surge in births. Now enough would-be parents avoid the date, when they have the choice of scheduling delivery, that the birth rate dips on the 11th.

Even so, there are plenty of us born on September 11, and plenty of other people who booked their weddings for the fine, sunny period right after Labor Day. What is it like to have your personal celebration tied to a day of national mourning? On Zoom, I brought together Cadillac and a group of people to talk about their experience with the fraught date and how it’s changed over the past 25 years.

Adsel Sparrow, who was born in 2001, wore a birthday crown to school while her teachers grappled with how to teach the infamous “9/11 lesson.” Many of those birthdays were spent watching archival news footage.

But even prior to receiving any formal education about the attacks, Sparrow knew September 11 was a “special day” because of how the tone of radio broadcasts would change on her birthday.

“Every other day it’d be happy news and music and then on my birthday it’d be like, ‘On this day 3,000 people died, and people lost their lives, and we’ve gone into a war, and it was the most depressing news,’” Sparrow said.