Pete Davidson Lost His Dad on 9/11 at 7 — Becoming a Father Changed What That Grief Means
Pete Davidson was seven years old when his father, New York City firefighter Scott Davidson, died responding to the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001. Twenty-five years later, Pete is approaching the age his father was when he died — and he is now a father himself.
That changes the emotional math of the anniversary. In an interview published this week, Davidson described 2026 as his first 9/11 as a father and called the day both “extra tough” and “extra beautiful” because he would spend it with his daughter, Scottie. Her name is itself part of the family story: Scottie was named in honor of Scott Davidson.
On September 10, Davidson is also part of NYC Still Rising After 25 Years, a 9/11 charities comedy benefit at Madison Square Garden alongside Jon Stewart and other comedians. The arena is the public part of the story. The quieter part is a son trying to understand his father’s death from a place he could not have understood at seven: as someone responsible for a child of his own.
Grief can look old on a calendar and still become new again when your life reaches a place the person you lost never got to see.
Why this 9/11 anniversary feels different for Pete Davidson
Davidson has spoken publicly for years about losing his father. What has changed is the vantage point. Scott Davidson was 33 when he died. Pete, who turns 33 in November, is now close enough to that age for the number to feel less like a fact in a biography and more like a life he can measure against his own.
He has also described thinking about how he will explain September 11 to Scottie. That question is not only about history. It is about how a parent introduces a child to a grandfather she will know through photographs, stories and the people who still remember him.
There is something especially complicated about reaching the age of someone who died young. The number stops being part of their biography and becomes a comparison you can feel in your own body: this is how much life they had lived. This is how much they had left unfinished. This is how young they actually were.
Parenthood can sharpen that realization. You are no longer only the child who was left behind. You can suddenly imagine the other side of the loss: what it would mean for your own child to lose you now.
Comedy, memory and the people who helped after loss
The Madison Square Garden benefit is a public event, but it fits a longer thread in Davidson’s story. He has repeatedly connected 9/11 with the people and communities who showed up for families afterward. A new 25th-anniversary documentary also revisits his connection with Michael Strahan, whose New York Giants were among the people who met children and families affected by the attacks. Entertainment Weekly reported that Davidson agreed to participate in the documentary in part because of the trust he has built with Strahan.
That matters because grief is rarely carried by one person alone. A death changes a family, but the way a family survives the years after it is also shaped by camps, teachers, relatives, friends, neighbors and strangers who know when to stay close.
Sometimes support does not erase pain. It simply makes pain less lonely.
The strange way grief grows with us
We often talk about grief as if time should steadily reduce it. In real life, grief changes shape. A child may miss a parent at graduation. Years later, the same loss can return at a wedding. It can return when a baby is born. It can return when you realize you now look older than the person in every photograph.
That does not mean someone has failed to heal. It may mean the relationship is still being understood from new stages of life.
One of the hardest parts of losing someone young is that your knowledge of them can stay frozen while your own life keeps expanding. You keep collecting experiences they never reached. Each new stage can create a new question you were too young to ask before.
OliviaC reflection: Grief does not only return on anniversaries. Sometimes it returns when your life reaches a place theirs never got to.
A calendar date can hold pride, pain, survival and memory at the same time. CWM does not yet have a strong Evergreen guide specifically about anniversary grief or becoming a parent after losing a parent, so I would rather leave that gap visible than force Pete Davidson’s story into an addiction-specific article that does not belong here. For the broader idea that moving forward does not require erasing what came before, How to Begin Again Without Shame is the closest current next step.
What readers may want to know next
Pete Davidson’s 9/11 story has several natural next chapters: who Scott Davidson was beyond the uniform, why Pete and former partner Elsie Hewitt chose the name Scottie, how he has spoken about childhood grief over the years, why he trusted Michael Strahan with this anniversary documentary, and how becoming a parent can reopen questions about a parent who died young.
Those are not separate from the deeper question. They are how many of us understand a difficult subject in the first place: we follow one person’s story long enough that it starts making us think about our own.
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Sources
Madison Square Garden — NYC Still Rising After 25 Years
The Independent — Pete Davidson on his first 9/11 as a father
Entertainment Weekly — Pete Davidson, Michael Strahan and the long shadow of 9/11
Featured image: Pete Davidson, photographed by LaVar James in 2025, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.