My friends know that many of my online posts advocate for hope and optimism. But the 20th anniversary today, of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks inflicted on peaceable Americans, is a very heavy lift for such advocacy. The horror and malevolence were too concrete; monstrous, unwarranted ambushes in settings whose safety we should take for granted.

Events as ghastly as the ones remembered today are abhorrent to what we would believe is both people’s basic decent Nature, and our ability to evolve for the better. So much so, they may seem to call into question how different we really are from creatures with fangs and claws, obviously designed for killing. But I will suggest a way we may try to evoke light out of a dark calamity in which it is not, otherwise, to be found.

Of all the heartbreaking images that emerged in the unspeakable aftermath of the New York attacks, the one that struck me hardest was a photograph showing masses of portraits – smiling, relaxed, unsuspecting of their Fate – of people who had died at the World Trade Center just for going to work that Tuesday morning. They appeared to be all small (but uniform) posters on standard office paper. The victim’s name appeared below the image with a simple directive: ‘REMEMBER ME,’ printed above.

This was apparently an organized memorial. Hundreds of such posters were put up in Lower Manhattan, grim pleas to onlookers not to let these slaughtered innocents simply dissolve into forgetting, as they had vanished into the flames and dust of the attacks. I have not been able to find that specific picture, but the one shown here is very close, minus the ‘REMEMBER ME’ headings.

Much could be said about the moral, political and cultural implications of this act of consummate ferocity, but if there is one profoundly personal lesson we should all take from the infamy of September 11, it must be how precious, frail, transient and uncertain life is. How it can placidly glow like a rainbow of motes of dew, only to be swept away as abruptly as it had appeared. And to treat our own lives and those we love as the incomparable treasures they are.

Yet perhaps we may also ‘evoke light’ by helping those murdered so terribly to avoid a second passing away: By being utterly forgotten.

Most of the dead presumably led ordinary lives, and the world would likely never otherwise have heard of them. But if their lives were ordinary, their deaths were the very essence of tragedy. And that alone should entitle them to more than that all memory of them should just be swallowed by the gray maw of Time and disappear.

Thus, if we strive to think upon these dead strangers, even occasionally, we rise above the maniacal self-absorption of the terrorist bandits who stole their very existences. Paying such attention is a gift of our own Selves – our time and memory – which restores a vestige of ‘being’ to them instead of sheer, bereft absence.

Remembering the dead of September 11 is a relatively small task but it ensures that the annihilating intent of that nightmare on a sunny day in New York does not fully succeed. We may thwart their killers’ wish to destroy utterly by doing the duty of the righteous: To help build. And to sustain. So please:

Remember them.