Tragic events that leave deep emotional scars on those left behind are supposed to soften with the passage of time.
But not always.
Not even after twenty-five years. On that beautiful September morning, beneath a clear blue sky, the world we knew changed in a matter of hours. Innocent lives disappeared. Families were shattered. First responders ran toward something everyone else was desperately trying to escape. And two majestic icons of the New York City skyline collapsed into wailing clouds of smoke, dust and twisted metal. Twenty-five years later, the images have not lost their power. The sky remembers.
Each year I watch the September 11th remembrance ceremony in New York City. I listen as the names are read aloud, one after another, by husbands and wives, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, grandchildren who never had the opportunity to know the person whose name they now carry into another generation. And still, the tears fall.
Perhaps September 11th became even more personal for me after visiting the 9/11 Memorial and Museum with my family. Standing at the footprint of the North Tower, I could not think of it simply as a memorial. I felt that I was standing on sacred ground. There was an overwhelming sense of the lives that had existed there, of the ordinary people who had gone to work that morning expecting an ordinary Tuesday. I found myself imagining that perhaps those who perished were somehow still watching over the visitors who came to remember them, searching the crowds for a familiar face, a child now grown, a spouse now older, or someone who simply came to say:
I remember you.
That may be what matters most now.
Twenty-five years have passed, and inevitably many more will follow. Those of us who remember exactly where we were when the first plane struck will grow older and, in time, that painful vision may fade. A generation has already reached adulthood with no personal memory of September 11, 2001. Someday, no living person will be able to say, “I was there,” or “I remember.” September 11th will become history. Words in a book. Photographs in an archive. Artifacts behind glass. Names belonging to people born long before them.
Unless we tell their stories.
Unless we bring our children and grandchildren to that hallowed ground and teach them that nearly three thousand individual lives existed behind that terrible number. They laughed. They loved. They had families, plans, unfinished conversations, and people waiting for them to come home.
They were here.
They mattered. And twenty-five years later, they still matter.
Time will continue its relentless march forward. Buildings have risen again. Children have been born. Generations will come and go.
But remembrance is something we choose.
Twenty-five years later, we speak their names.
We tell their stories.
We stand on sacred ground.
And we never forget.
