I think of a lot on this day: the colleagues who perished aboard the plane that struck the Pentagon, the discovery that a childhood friend with whom I’d lost touch had become a NYC cop and died at ground zero, the strangeness of lunching outside in stunning weather with a friend after our D.C.-based offices had closed and we’d attended an impromptu service at my parish, my sister who’d worked in the insurance industry in NYC and must have attended at least a dozen 9/11 funerals, the New Yorker’s parenthetical but oddly powerful observation that the Trade Center attacks had wiped out an entire zip code.

But I think particularly of my late grandfather, who was 90 when the towers fell. A day or so later, his caretaker took my mother aside to express his concern that the attacks had muddled Gran’daddy’s usually sharp mind. “He keeps talking about watching them build the towers,” Joon explained, “when what we saw on TV was the buildings falling down.” No, Mom reassured him, Gran’daddy was not mixed up. He’d been an executive for American President Lines, the first commercial tenant in the World Trade Center. From APL’s nearby office, he had indeed watched the towers rise, and his last major project before retiring was orchestrating the firm’s move into the new space. And then he watched that key chapter of his life vanish into smoke.

May God grant eternal rest and light perpetual to those who died and healing and comfort to those who mourn.

Rest eternal to those who were lost, healing and peace to those who responded to the disaster sites and survived, and comfort to the families with those empty spaces.

I spent a lot of time thinking of the children who lost their parents, because a person close to us has one of her friends going through that right now.  May God grant them strength.