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Right now, the United States is in the midst of several national tragedies. 21 years ago, there was another: 

I was in New York City on 9/11. At that time my wife and I lived on Long Island and both of us commuted into the city for work. 

9/11 started out as a glorious day. In New York the most beautiful days almost always have at least a few white fluffy clouds. On that morning, however, the sky was a perfectly clear blue. Literally not a cloud in the sky. I remember walking from Pennsylvania Station (the train station at 34th Street on the West side of Manhattan) up 8th Avenue to where I worked on 51st Street. It was such an incredibly delightful walk that day. 

Before the real work of the day began there was a buzz throughout the office. The TV in the break room was on and there were live reports of the “accident” downtown at the World Trade Center. If we craned out necks, as we looked out our office windows, we could barely see the plume of smoke coming from downtown. Then the second plane hit. And later that morning the towers collapsed. 

They closed the office early so that we could try to get home. For me that wasn’t exactly easy to do. The trains and subways weren’t running. There were no busses. In fact, no traffic at all. Just a huge mass of people, walking. All walking in the same direction. All walking uptown. All very quiet. 

It was the strangest thing I had ever seen: The streets of New York without any traffic. I felt like I was in one of those futuristic science fiction movies. Every once in a while, an emergency vehicle would rush by, blaring its siren when it reached a major intersection, but that was about it. Otherwise, the silence was deafening. 

By the afternoon of 9/11 the city had responded and was prepared to treat hundreds or even thousands of casualties. But the number of the injured, that needed to be treated at the hospitals, was minor. And there were even fewer processed at the morgue. 

It wasn’t until days later that I started to realize what had really happened. I don’t recall hearing anyone say it out loud, or reading it in the newspapers, or seeing it on TV, but to me the reality was undeniable. It wasn’t that 3,000 people had died. It was that 3,000 people had disappeared. 

I first saw the 8½ by 11 posters (in New York we call them flyers) at Penn Station when I returned to work. As I walked uptown, I passed a fire station and there were more flyers. And then more in front of a local hospital. Almost immediately after 9/11 the flyers started as a trickle, then a stream and then a flood. “Have you seen this person?” they asked, with a picture of a missing loved one. 

The relatives and friends of the missing hoped that first-responders had taken their loved ones to a hospital somewhere in the city. They actually hoped that their loved ones were hurt and unable to communicate -- but still alive. They posted the flyers in the hope that someone had seen their loved ones and would miraculously call with information. 

The reality was that their loved ones were no more. In the sheer weight and magnitude of the collapse of the twin towers 3,000 people had been smashed to dust. 

In the months that followed, workers cleared the wreckage at ground zero and the newspapers occasionally reported that another remnant had been found. The construction workers reverently draped a flag over the remains and treated each find as if it was an entire person. But usually it was just a small body part. The city asked the relatives of missing victims to bring in DNA samples. 

The flyers were up for months. Even the authorities didn’t have the heart to take them down. In Penn Station every inch of a temporary plywood wall was covered with flyers. When the construction project it enclosed was finished, the plywood wall was moved to another part of the station. 

I remember walking past those flyers every day for almost a year. In the morning going to work, and in the evening going home. And every day thinking about those people who had disappeared and their faces on those flyers. For me that is what I will never forget about 9/11. 

Bob Litt is a native New Yorker who now lives in Las Vegas.