I had no idea, when I decided to take my week-long sabbatical, that the return date was the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. But it is, and here I am. It seems like yesterday. I’d just gotten into my car after a visit with my doctor. The radio said a plane flew into the World Trade Center. My first thought was a small plane, a sad tragic accident. Then for some reason I thought of the B-25 that flew into the Empire state building in July of 1945, a truly sad, tragic accident because the war ended months later.

Anyway, the day unfolded. We went to war. That war just ended. And now we’ll spend today revisiting the events of 20 years ago. It’s a day we’ll vow never to forget, except that eventually we will, because time will pass. I was born five years after a day that was supposed to live in Infamy, and now we all drive Japanese cars. I remember where I was when both Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King were killed, but not many other people do. Memorial Day started out commemorating the end of the Civil War, but it’s now an amalgamation of Armistice Day (the end of WWI), VE-Day, VJ-Day, Vietnam, and Korea.

For those directly involved with 9/11, it will of course, remain a feature of their lives, but for most of us life continues with our own tragedies. There were a lot of people saddened by my wife’s death last year, but by now it’s a historical artifact, softened by time. Meanwhile, out in the garden the schoolhouse flowers she loved are blooming and I guarantee you they have no idea what’s going on. And then one day, I, too shall pass, and maybe a stranger will dig them up and they’ll enter into someone else’s life and off we’ll all go.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale