We Will Never Forget

  Eleven years later and it is still so fresh in our memories, but today for the first time my thoughts turned to the future. How much longer will the memorials continue to be covered live on all the networks? I thought as I watched today. I'm struck by the fact that many of the children reading the names today were just babies, toddlers when this all happened. How much longer will this memory-which seems seared permanently onto my brain-live on?
  Children grow up, parents, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, move on and pass away until at some point there will no longer be anyone who remembers this day because they lived it, there will only be the pictures, the videos and timelines, to bring it into the collective consciousness. In a way, I envy these future generations. They won't have that pit of the stomach churn, the tears, the nightmares and fears. For them it will be a memorial of something tragic, something awful, that happened once, but not to them.
  And so, eleven years later, as I listen once more to the seemingly endless list of the victims names being read one more time, I pray that these future generations will never experience anything even approaching the horror of that day. I pray that we will all finally figure out how to live peacefully with one another, no matter how farfetched and impossible that thought might seem.
  At the same time I pray that we will truly never forget all those people-who just like me-got up on September 11, 2001, grabbed breakfast and hurried off to their jobs or flights, but never came home again. Those of us who did come home will never be the same. We carry their thoughts, their memories, their lives, their deaths, forward with us into that great unknown-the future.

  Dedicated to all my former fellow workers at NorthSouth Books and NordSued Verlag who witnessed this day from our office windows. You are all in my thoughts and prayers.


 To view the interactive timeline of the events of September 11, 2001, click here