Twenty-two Mercer County residents in all, residents who didn't come home that crisp and cloudless Tuesday morning nearly a decade and a half ago.
Their names are hardwired into our collective DNA:
Colleen Ann Barkow, Lorraine Grace Bay, Debbie S. Bellows, William Reed Bethke, Anil T. Bharvaney, Jeffrey M. Chairnoff.
Twenty-two Mercer County residents in all, residents who didn't come home that crisp and cloudless Tuesday morning nearly a decade and a half ago.
Catherine E. Chirls, Michael Joseph Cunningham, Pamela Lee Gaff, Steven Goldstein, Andrew Marshall King, Neil Kwong-Wah Lai.
On Friday at 8 a.m., members of the public will gather at Patriots Point in Clinton, to watch a flag being raised by local veterans in solemn thanks for those who serve, and to remember those who died in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.
Ruth Sheila Lapin, Steven Lawn, Daniel L. Maher, Tu-Anh Pham, Edward Richard Pykon, Frank B. Reisman.
Hamilton Township will hold its annual 9/11 remembrance at noon the same day at the Sept. 11 Memorial Grove inside Veterans Park.
Wherever we find ourselves in the county, whether at public ceremonies or in private reverie, our thoughts will travel back to the moment when nearly 3,000 innocent people lost their lives at the hands of terrorists, and America lost its innocence.
John Joseph Ryan, Susan Lee Kennedy Schuler, David Scott Suarez and Kevin Patrick York.
We carry the scars of that day in endless iterations.
The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund paid out nearly $1 billion over the past year to many who were injured in the attacks in lower Manhattan, in Washington D.C. and over the skies of Western Pennsylvania.
For the first responders, whose valor helped keep the death toll from rising even higher, the future is murky.
Many have developed life-threatening illnesses from exposure to asbestos, lead, glass fibers and other toxic substances that day and the days following. Workers at Ground Zero have been diagnosed with 15 percent more cases of cancer than their peers: more than 4,250 cases as December 2014.
Congress has until next October to reauthorize the World Trade Center Health Program, which helps these patients - many with asthma and other lung problems, others with severe cases of post-traumatic stress disorder - cope with spiraling medical costs.
To their credit, all 12 members of New Jersey's congressional delegation are co-sponsors of the legislation to reauthorize the program through what's come to be called the Zadroga Act, named for a New York City police detective who died in 2006.
Mercer County and all of New Jersey took a particularly hard hit in the attacks. This week's ceremonies are an important way of remembering.
An even better response would be reauthorization of the legislation that treats the men and women who stepped up that day in the face of overwhelming danger.