Bill Ward has described visiting the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York for the first time, in an account given on his September 2026 edition of LA Radio Sessions with Mike Stark — and delivered days before the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks.
"Well, we went there. And the reason why I wanted to go there was to see — because I hadn't been to the museum, which is fantastic, the way that they have put things together so that we will never forget," the BLACK SABBATH drummer said. "I felt very sad, obviously, going through there, and it had very dark moments in there. I was with family members who — that helped a lot, passing through there."
What settled him was architectural. "The biggest thing that I felt brought me peace of mind was seeing how they've built the waterfalls that fall into infinity," Ward said. "And I think that's such a wonderful grace because if they didn't look like they fell into infinity or they landed somewhere else, there wouldn't have been a stopping point for me. But whoever designed that designed these small waterfalls, and then the large waterfall that just goes into infinity. And they did that exactly for the first and second tower."
He did not dress up what happened next. "To be honest with you, I stayed there for some time and I said prayers and I cried. It's hard not to cry. But I came back from New York with some peace of mind because I had no idea how they would resolve that. How can you resolve something like that? And I know it can't be fully resolved, but at least I think, as New Yorkers always do, they do their best. They really come through, there's no doubt about it."
The instinct Ward is responding to is exactly the one the memorial was built around. Its two pools sit in the footprints of the North and South Towers, each nearly an acre, holding the largest manmade waterfalls in North America — water drops thirty feet into a square basin, then another twenty into a smaller central void. Architect Michael Arad has described the pools as "absence made visible": water flows in constantly, and the voids can never be filled.
The names of the 2,983 people killed in the 2001 and 1993 attacks are cut into bronze parapets around the pools, arranged by where and how people died and by what the memorial calls "meaningful adjacencies" — colleagues together, flight crews together, and next of kin able to request that a name sit beside a specific other. Around 400 swamp white oaks fill the plaza.