Twenty years seems impossible.
For those of us who remember September 11, 2001, that morning still does not feel like something that happened twenty years ago. I can still remember how quickly an ordinary day turned into something none of us would ever forget.
But twenty years is a long time.
There are now adults who were not yet born when the attacks happened, and an entire generation that knows September 11 only through stories, photographs, video, and what they have been taught.
That makes remembering even more important.
Today is about the nearly 3,000 people who were killed. The people who went to work that morning, the passengers and crews who boarded four airplanes, the first responders who ran toward danger, and the passengers of Flight 93 who fought back.
It is also about the families who have now lived twenty years without someone they loved.
A lot has happened since September 11, 2001, and the world has changed in ways that would have been difficult to imagine that morning.
But today does not need to be about everything that came afterward.
Today should simply be about remembering the people we lost and making sure that, even as the years pass, their stories are not forgotten.