Today we mark the passing of 22 years since September 11th.

While there will be ceremonies and rememberances at the different attack and crash sites, especially for family members and friends who lost loved ones, the immediacy and impact of September 11th has faded as the years have passed. And nowhere is it more obvious than in the lack of institutional memory that is growing because the new adults among us – the Gen Z young adults – have no living memory of 9/11.

Gen Z, the “Zoomers,” who will remember COVID-19 as the seminal shaping force of their childhoods or young adulthoods, were either too young to remember the attacks or were not born yet. According to most sociological groupings, Gen Z begins around 1997. Even late Millennials struggle to remember 9/11, as they would have been in very early elementary school. A person born in 1997 would have been, at best, four years old on September 11, 2001. My own Gen Z children, at ages almost-twenty and eighteen, were both born after 9/11. It seems incredible that we are a full generation removed from 9/11 now, when the memory of that day can feel so raw and immediate for those of us who lived through it. How do we begin to convey to them the horror, the grief, the shock that we all felt?

Maybe we start with the realities. Today, documentaries will play and the horrific footage of the planes being deliberately steered into the Two Towers will be shown. When that footage airs, remember that when those planes explode, we are watching the murders of hundreds of people in a fiery instant.

When we see the Two Towers collapse, we are witnessing the deaths of hundreds as the life is crushed out of them.

We rarely see the images or videos that exist of the jumpers, because that would put real people and real faces to the tremendous agony and horrific moments that happened as those people took control of their own fates in the only way they knew how. Those who saw the jumpers never forgot that horror.

When we see the grainy footage of Flight 77 slamming into the Pentagon, we are witnessing the deaths of 184 people, either in that moment or in the moments or hours that followed.

Only investigators and the families have ever heard the final cockpit recordings from Flight 93, though the transcript has been released. The forty people who died on that flight saved countless lives at the cost of their own.

For all of us watching the horror unfold in real time, it seemed death was everywhere. There was a sick sort of suspense as all the flights were grounded before something else could happen. We had no idea if it was over. We had no idea what was beginning, either.

On September 11th, we only knew that we were looking at death on a scale not seen in decades. And we didn’t even know how many people were dead. It felt overwhelming, even from a distance.

We were devastated. And then we got angry.

As the years go by, those of us with living memory of 9/11 will eventually disappear, as the World War II generation and those who witnessed Pearl Harbor are close to doing as well. All that we felt, all that we saw, all that death and destruction – someday, it will only be known in museums and photos and videos and documentaries. So while we still can, we must tell Gen Z and the generations after what happened that day – before we, too, become history.

Featured image via Armelion on Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license