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Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. — C.S. Lewis

Someone once said to me that the morning the Towers went down is my generation’s Kennedy assassination.

I blanched a little upon hearing that, of course. Thousands of people died that day, not one, however powerful and symbolic he may have been.

I see it now, though.

As with Kennedy’s death, everyone remembers where they were when they heard. And I mean everyone. I don’t have a single friend who can’t tell you where they were standing, who told them, what they saw first on the news… all of it.

The more important commonality between those two events, however, is the shock people felt from outside the situation looking in… a surreal kind of horror that manifested itself in ways we didn’t expect. I couldn’t stop shaking with this fierce sensation of cold, which seemed crazy at the time.

After all, I wasn’t there.

I wasn’t even NEAR there. I didn’t know anyone who died. Who was I to feel a chill?

But a chill is what we feel when something is too horrible to comprehend. The loss of warmth, of good, of right, of sense, of peace.

Six years later, I still feel a chill when I think of the events of that day, and I try and imagine what people went through after waking up to a nightmare.

But I also feel an incredible warmth when I think of the sacrifices people made to care for one another. A warmth for the stories of courage and compassion, many of which will never be told. A warmth for the way families came together to mourn and begin to heal their losses.

I don’t know how they did it, and I don’t know how they do it.

But I honour all of them today.