How many times yesterday did you remember it was an anniversary day?
How many times, did it come up yesterday, and you immediately remembered where you were and what you were doing when you first heard a plane had struck the Twin Towers 11 years ago?
Before the fact, we were thinking yesterday’s anniversary would prompt us to feel something of course, but something less than the 10th anniversary last year, and certainly not as much as the 15th and 20th and 25th anniversaries to come.
There is something about divisible numbers that make those milestones seem to matter more, but that’s just a trick of imagination. They all mean just as much.
Yesterday, while maybe not as wrapped up in as nice and neat a psychological package as the “Tenth Anniversary,” still felt much the same as the year before and the year before that, and the year before that.
For those of us who carry 9/11 with us as an immediate, searing memory, it is likely to be this way for the rest of our lives.
Future generations will have their own tragedies to bear; for them 9/11 will be their parents or grandparents memories codified in history books. It will mean to them what “Remember the Maine” means to us.
We’re trying to get on with our lives, as we should. It is probably right to feel the people who died that day would want their loved ones to get on with their lives, the same way we would want our loved ones to carry on if something happened to us.
The First Responders who died that day, really the First Responders who do what they do every day, do it in part so those they rescue can keep living.
We owe it to all of the victims of 9/11 to keep on keeping on, but we are a long, long way from being over it.
