When Will Jimeno was trapped beneath the ruins of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, he was not thinking about anniversaries.

He was not imagining himself telling the story 25 years later.

He was thinking about his family.

Jimeno, then a 33-year-old rookie Port Authority police officer, had a 4-year-old daughter named Bianca and a wife, Allison, who was seven months pregnant with their second child.

Pinned beneath roughly 30 feet of wreckage after the Twin Towers collapsed, surrounded by darkness, heat and the bodies of fellow officers who had not survived, Jimeno became convinced that he might never see them again.

At one desperate point, he tried to get a message to his wife.

If he did not make it home, he wanted their unborn daughter to be named Olivia.

The radio was not working.

But Jimeno survived.

He was eventually pulled from the rubble after approximately 13 hours, becoming one of a tiny number of people rescued alive from the debris.

Twenty-five years later, the milestones he once feared he would miss have become the part of his survival story that matters most.

He saw Bianca and Olivia grow up.

He attended birthdays.

He watched graduations.

He showed up for sports competitions.

And the baby he worried he might never meet is now a 24-year-old woman with a career of her own.

He Had Gone Into the World Trade Center to Help Others

The morning of Sept. 11 began normally for Jimeno.

A Navy veteran and relatively new Port Authority officer, he kissed his pregnant wife and young daughter goodbye before reporting for work.

Then the first plane struck the World Trade Center.

Jimeno was among the officers sent downtown.

He and other members of the Port Authority Police Department entered the complex to help evacuate civilians.

Then the South Tower collapsed.

The force of the destruction buried Jimeno and several other officers beneath concrete, steel and other debris.

Two members of his group, Christopher Amoroso and Antonio Rodrigues, were killed.

Fellow officer Dominick Pezzulo initially survived the collapse but later died after the North Tower came down.

Jimeno remained trapped near his supervisor, Sgt. John McLoughlin.

The two men could do almost nothing except stay awake and wait.

“This Is Going to Come Down to the Will We Have to Survive”

Jimeno has described the conditions beneath the wreckage as almost impossible to comprehend.

He was immobilized and injured.

Smoke and dust filled the space around him.

Fires burned nearby.

There was no certainty that rescuers even knew they were alive.

McLoughlin urged him to stay conscious, understanding that giving in to exhaustion could mean never waking up.

The men prayed and talked as hours passed.

Eventually, rescuers heard them.

NYPD Emergency Service Unit members, including Scott Strauss and Paddy McGee, joined the dangerous effort to reach the trapped officers. The 9/11 Memorial & Museum says the rescue team spent more than three hours working through unstable, smoke-filled wreckage to free Jimeno. McLoughlin was rescued later.

Jimeno finally emerged late that night.

The world above him had disappeared.

Surviving Was Only the Beginning

Being pulled from the rubble did not mean Jimeno’s ordeal was over.

His injuries were severe.

He was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where PEOPLE reports that he flatlined twice and eventually underwent eight surgeries. His left leg remained partially paralyzed.

Physical recovery was only one part of what followed.

Jimeno also struggled with post-traumatic stress.

The memories of being trapped, watching colleagues die and emerging into a city transformed by catastrophe did not simply disappear because he was alive.

His injuries eventually forced him to retire from the Port Authority in 2004.

Over time, therapy became an important part of learning how to live with what happened rather than expecting the trauma to vanish completely.

He also began telling his story publicly.

The 9/11 Memorial & Museum has repeatedly featured Jimeno in educational programs, where he has emphasized not only devastation but the people who rushed toward danger to help strangers.

Then Came the Moment He Had Begged to Live For

Only weeks after the attacks, Jimeno got something he had feared he would never receive.

He met Olivia.

His wife gave birth in November 2001.

Jimeno watched from a wheelchair.

The date happened to be his 34th birthday.

For a man who had spent hours beneath the World Trade Center wondering whether his unborn child would grow up without him, the moment carried an extraordinary meaning.

And he did not simply survive long enough to meet her.

He stayed.

For the next quarter-century, Jimeno got to do the ordinary things that seemed impossible while he was buried beneath the towers.

He watched both daughters grow into adults.

He attended school events and celebrations.

Olivia remembers him showing up for her cheerleading competitions and volleyball games.

He even taught her to turkey hunt.

Those moments may sound small beside the scale of 9/11.

For Jimeno, that is precisely why they matter.

His Daughters Became the Life After the Headline

Today, both daughters have built lives of their own.

Bianca graduated from Auburn University and pursued work in communications.

Olivia also attended Auburn and now works with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Alabama.

Olivia belongs to a generation with no personal memory of Sept. 11.

She was not even born when her father entered the World Trade Center.

Yet the attacks shaped her family before she took her first breath.

She grew up knowing that her father’s presence at birthdays, games and graduations was never guaranteed.

For her, his survival is also part of a wider responsibility.

Jimeno is still alive to talk about people who are not.

He can tell younger generations about the officers who went into the towers, the rescuers who refused to leave him behind and the colleagues who never came home.

“I Focus on the Light”

Jimeno does not pretend that Sept. 11 became something positive.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed that day.

His fellow officers died only feet from him.

The physical and psychological consequences followed him for years.

But he has chosen not to allow the darkest hours of his life to become the only part of the story.

“Everyone focuses on the darkness,” he told PEOPLE. “I focus on the light.”

For Jimeno, that light has a very specific shape.

It is Allison.

It is Bianca.

It is Olivia.

It is the rescuers who crawled into an unstable mountain of rubble when others were warning them to get out.

And it is every ordinary family memory he almost never had.

Twenty-Five Years Later, That May Be the Real Miracle

The image most people remember from Will Jimeno’s story is dramatic:

A police officer buried alive beneath the World Trade Center for 13 hours and somehow pulled out.

But survival was only the first chapter.

The rest unfolded much more quietly.

A wheelchair beside a hospital bed when Olivia was born.

Birthday parties.

Communions.

School sports.

Graduations.

Family photographs taken decades after everyone feared there might never be another one.

Twenty-five years after Sept. 11, Jimeno can look at two grown daughters and understand exactly what his rescuers gave him.

Not simply more years.

A life inside those years.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Will Jimeno kissed one daughter goodbye and left another still waiting to be born.

That night, he came terrifyingly close to never seeing either of them again.

A quarter-century later, he has watched both grow up.

And for a man who once lay beneath 30 feet of rubble wondering whether his family would ever see him again, that may be the greatest part of surviving at all.