On Sept. 11, 2025, we Americans now live in the tomorrow they never had: men, women, children and unborn babies who disappeared — vanished from sight and sound, totally and completely removed from our midst.

In one instant, between a breath and a heartbeat, their lives ended 24 years ago. On that day a pathway reopened. For a moment, within blackening darkness and smothering smoke, Americans glimpsed the brightness of what rose among them. Visible in their midst, where walls of concrete and stone and steel had disappeared, something old and precious stood new again.

For a brief moment, that something stared back at the eyes watching from around the globe. Here in this place that is our home, we viewed with unquestioned clarity the physical damage inflicted by those who hate. We heard with more than our ears the sadness of crying, felt with more than fingers the touch of smoke that coated skin and left a bad taste. In the air that we breathed, we felt the life of all who died that day.

For another brief moment, men and women in 50 states ceased thinking of differences and shared something bigger than towering physical structures. There in the world’s largest city, eight million people looked out of windows to see blurred daylight. Smoke and ashes hid what had been the bright sky of a September day, but, surprisingly at that same moment, there opened with clarity a brief glimpse of a “new birth of freedom.”

Voices of the past echoed. Two hundred and twenty-five years had passed since members of Congress signed the Declaration of Independence and the United States of America was born. Sept. 11 stares us in the face, makes us look with more than our eyes, hear with more than our ears.

What can be found?

The future rises from that beginning, depends upon our seeing, touching, and holding it with all the strength we can muster. How do we reopen a connection to that beginning? What is it, the American dream, and who is reaching for it?

Is knowledge like the night sky? Visible through lenses created by humans, but invisible at the same time? Ideas exist in human minds, like stars and comets in the physical emptiness that stretches into a vast unknown, touchable only if the image can be imprinted upon our brains.

Holding thoughts becomes the gift that words give us … a way to know what is not physical, a way to keep what has disappeared from physical view.

How does one keep an idea? No touch, no feel. Words offer a way to hold onto what becomes physical. Stars, unseen in daylight, represent what can be understood when vision extends beyond narrow thinking? Has the building’s disappearance left an opening through which we can see?

One of the tallest buildings in the world fell. Now rebuilt alongside a treed park, it stands again, a memorial that welcomes a glimpse of something that lies at the heart of America. Thousands visit the memorial every day, but the spirit of pride remains shadowed. Their deaths were a huge warning, a blinking red light, a scream sounding. They listened, the loved ones who mourned, but the sounds of that day have diminished.

What thoughts are left? Has life become simply moving in a useless excess of physicality to keep human bodies young and fit — for what? Is pleasure now the only purpose of living? The warning sounds loud and clear.

Those men back in 1776 saw something bigger. On Sept. 11 we must ask the question that requires an answer. Then we shall realize that the answer is the reason we stop on this day to remember.

Harriet Freiberger has lived in the Elk River Valley since 1982.