It has been 24 years since 9/11. As we have seen in recent years and the passing of the Greatest Generation, it doesn’t take very long before a seminal event, like Pearl Harbor or 9/11, passes from living memory and then into history.

In the not-too-distant future, the names engraved at the 9/11 Memorial in New York, the Pentagon Memorial, and the Flight 93 Memorial will have fewer and fewer people who remember the real people behind the carved name, the same way that there are few people still alive who clearly know the names on the USS Arizona Memorial as real people. But there are those still working, more than two decades later, to identify those who died that day. And a little over a month ago, three victims were identified.

Floral Park resident Ryan Fitzgerald and Palm Springs, California grandmother Barbara Keating were positively ID’d – as well as an adult woman whose family did not want her name released publicly, officials announced Thursday.

The Office of Chief Medical Examiner used advanced DNA testing and family outreach to ID the remains — the 1,651st, 1,652nd and 1,653rd victims officially identified since the attacks.

Fitzgerald, 26, was working as a foreign currency trader at Fiduciary Trust International in the south tower when a hijacked plane crashed into it while Keating, a 72-year-old grandmother, was on American Airlines Flight 11 that left Boston shortly before it spiraled into the north tower.

Keating’s son Paul Keating, 61, commended the staff at the medical examiner’s office for “still working their ass off” all these years later, saying “they won’t rest for us.”

“And I don’t know how to react to that. It’s just an amazing feat, gesture – it’s more than that because they’ve been doing it as their life for 24 years,” Paul Keating, 61, told The Post.

“We’re talking about moving six blocks of Manhattan to Staten Island and going through it milligram by milligram for 24 years,” he added in reference to the wreckage moved to Fresh Kills in the aftermath. “I mean, isn’t that amazing to you. No one’s ever done something like that for me, my family ever and I couldn’t thank them enough.”

Fitzgerald’s identity was confirmed through remains recovered in 2002 while Keating’s ID and the third undisclosed victim were linked to remains found in 2011, the medical examiner’s office said.

It is amazing that 24 years later, the medical examiner’s office is still working to identify the remains that were recovered. What is even more mind-blowing is that 40 percent of the victims in New York are still unidentified.

“This is not only the largest forensic investigation in the history of the United States, but it also the most difficult,” Mark Desire, the OCME’s Assistant Director, said.

Roughly 7,000 human remains — some as small as the tip of a fingernail — have been sitting in the city’s possession for two decades waiting to be identified, but in most cases, technology is still too slow to break the case.

“The fragmentation, the jet fuel, the fire and the water and bacteria, sunlight, all those things destroy DNA. Everything was present at Ground Zero,” Desire, who was on the ground when the second tower collapsed, said.

In some cases, the experts are waiting for technology to advance further before they return to some of the samples. Plenty are so small that putting it through another round of testing could mean destroying the last remaining particle.

“Some of these fragments, you only get so many chances. So, we do know that instead of going and trying over and over again using the same modern techniques … When you’re dealing with smaller and smaller families, you know you may only have one shot left at this particular fragment, it gets very stressful,” Desire said.

Those unidentified remains are kept in a secure location at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, which is only accessible to the family members. “60 Minutes” covered the continuing quest to identify remains, and how families whose loved ones have yet to be identified, or those whose loved ones have another remain identified, can go to sit in a room that has become a private mausoleum.

The Habermans have asked to be told of all new identifications. For them, each reminder of their daughter is a steppingstone through a void… that Gordon Haberman calls “missing.”

Gordon Haberman: It’s hard to describe “missing” to other people, but it’s deep inside you. There isn’t a day that I or we don’t think of her.

We met Gordon Haberman at the national September 11th Memorial Museum at ground zero. With the help of the museum staff, we saw artifacts from Andrea’s purse which are archived, cataloged and handled like antiquities. He received them in 2004 from the NYPD in a meeting with officers and a priest.

Gordon Haberman: They wanted to know if I needed any, any help processing that. And I was actually more concerned at that time how I’m gonna keep these from my wife.

He feared his wife’s pain, so he locked the bag in a desk drawer which he did not open for seven years. In 2011 they donated to the museum the collection of a quarter century ago.

He brought Andrea’s identified remains home to Wisconsin but he believes her other remains, still unidentified, are in the museum behind this wall and a verse by the poet Virgil; “no day shall erase you from the memory of time.” Many museum visitors don’t realize, but this is the outer wall of the medical examiner’s repository for 9/11 remains.

Next to the repository, this is the entrance to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner family reflection room. The room and repository have never been seen by the public. Families, only, can call a number on the door which summons an escort, often, (the medical examiner’s World Trade Center anthropologist) Dr. Jennifer Odien.

Gordon Haberman invited us inside as his guest. No camera, but we were allowed to record the audio. We found a small sitting room and a window into the repository for human remains.

Scott Pelley: The window we’re looking through looks like it’s about five feet wide and three feet or so tall. Just a single window, and a single wooden bench in front of the window.

With permission, we gave our notes to an artist who sketched the view through the window that joins the family room to the repository. A loved one, sitting on the bench, sees a deep, austere, white room with rows of dark wooden cabinets eight feet tall. They hold about 10,000 remains—both known and unknown. It is, in a sense, a private national shrine.

Scott Pelley: Why do you come here after all these years?

Gordon Haberman: I feel close to my daughter. She wasn’t meant to be here, but she’s here.

The names that surround the reflecting pools outside may still have remains laying inside the respository inside. And thanks to the persistent efforts of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, those remains have been catalogued, labeled, and preserved for the day when DNA testing becomes good enough to extract a profile from a small fragment that may offer closure to a family who has never had a remain to bury. May those who live in hope that one day, their loved one will be accounted for, and find peace on this day when we stop and remember.

Featured image via Armelion on Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license