Illustration: Barbara Kelley

Once when I was little, seven or so, I was sitting on the couch with my Uncle Johnny and we were watching something about Memorial Day. Johnny was about 30, a veteran of Korea, and on a day off from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. On the TV they showed a cemetery and at the end they played “Taps.” Suddenly Johnny stood up from the couch, saluted and held the salute with tears in his eyes. I didn’t understand what I was seeing but I knew it was important, and came to understand it had to do with loyalty and grief. And of course I remember it now because that is what I am feeling toward 9/11. I just want to stand and salute as it goes by, and it is going by.

Oh my God what we felt that day and that night and for years after. We wore our hearts on our sleeves. Read the emails you sent, the diary entries. It was all so big. It was the last day of the 20th century and the first day of the 21st and somehow, by dusk, we knew this. In New York, the thing you have to understand is not that the towers were hit, we could have taken that and regained our stride the next morning. It’s that the towers came down. That was impossible. If the towers could fall anything could fall. If the towers fell they were taking a whole world with them.

It was too big, not only in itself, as a catastrophe, almost 3,000 dead, but because we knew it would likely be war, of one kind or another. That was a lot to absorb in a city covered in ash and filled with sirens, a city where people were still lined up in hospitals to volunteer and give blood and help the wounded who would never come.

And the wars ended as they ended, and so the muted tone of things, and all the confused pain.

I want to mention something that happened in this small space, this column, that I’d never experienced before, because it gets at something larger. I had been an online columnist at the Journal for a year. After 9/11, 50 of the next 52 columns were about 9/11, and in that time and before my eyes a whole living community sprang up. It was still the early days of the internet. I didn’t fully realize you could write a column or essay and your readers could immediately respond, telling you what they were experiencing and feeling, what they’d seen.

And we weren’t talking about “politics” we were pouring out our hearts and we did it every week. Readers sent stories of things they’d experienced—for some reason I think first of the telephone repairman in Queens showered by a small rain of paper following the collapse of the towers, who grabbed one as it went by, the business card of a stranger who worked at the World Trade Center, and he kept calling to see if she was all right, and she was. I’d tell the stories in future columns. We helped each other through. It was one of the greatest professional experiences of my life, to write to and with a group of people tied by trauma and keening together.

And what we lived through. How chic, hard shouldered New York was suddenly awash in religious imagery—prayer cards and pictures of saints, candles and statues—and no one resented it, everyone was generous, many joined in. We experienced 9/11 as a spiritual event. We saw an old-fashioned kind of masculinity come back. We looked for meaning. We grieved the firemen. Three hundred forty three of them entered history that day when they went up the stairs in their 70 pounds of gear, and tried to impose order on chaos. We knew: Those outer borough boys were not part of the story but the heart of the story. We’ll never get over them. We don’t want to. So many of them, as you can hear in their last phone calls, and in their faces in recent documentaries, understood they were on a suicide mission. But they stayed and wouldn’t leave. Because they were firemen.

We talked about everyone who added that day to the sum total of human glory. For all the horrors and blunders that surrounded 9/11 and would follow it, there was always that, and always would be.

There was Welles Crowther. Remember him? A young guy, 24, just starting out, worked as a junior associate at an investment bank on the 104th floor of the south tower. He always carried in his back pocket a red bandanna, and they teased him. WHAT ARE YOU, A FARMER? He’d laugh and show bravado: WITH THIS BANDANA I’M GONNA CHANGE THE WORLD. And that day as the world exploded he did. He led people to safety, carried them down to lower floors. He kept going back for more. To protect from the smoke he put the bandanna over his face. He never came home from the towers that day or the day after, his parents were anguished, hoping against hope. Then one day, three days in, his mother was at her desk at home in Nyack, N.Y. Suddenly she felt a presence behind her. She didn’t look, didn’t move. She knew it was Welles. She knew he was saying goodbye. She said: “Thank you.” She knew now he was dead. Months of mourning, no word on how he’d died. And one day, Memorial Day weekend 2002, the New York Times had a story about the last minutes in the towers, and they mentioned survivors who spoke of a man in a red bandanna who’d saved them. And Welles’s mother thought she knew who that was. She got a picture of her son to the survivors and they said yes, that was the man who saved me. Some time later they found his remains, near the command post the firemen had set up in the South Tower. When his family opened his apartment they found an unfinished application to become a New York City fireman.

Just a few days before 9/11, on Labor Day weekend, Welles, visiting his parents, was unusually subdued. He told his mother he had a feeling he was going to be part of something big, had a role to play in it or a job to do.

Isn’t it funny how the mind works, how it knows things it does not know?

“Courage comes from love,” was my summation in 2016. “There’s a big unseen current of love that hums through the world and some plug into it more than others, more deeply and surely.” It fills them with courage. It makes everything possible.

Now that day is over, the shock and the sacrifice and the explosion of love, and the stories that brought tears to your eyes, not only in New York and Washington but Afghanistan and Iraq, and beyond. And on this 20th anniversary of 9/11, this psychic endpoint, maybe the last time the grief will still feel fresh, I suspect a lot of us will just feel like Johnny and want to stand in silent tribute as we hear the lonesome old bugle call.

Fades the light

And afar

Goeth day, cometh night

And a star

Leadeth all

Speedeth all

To their rest.

Wonder Land: Following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, it became commonplace to say, “9/11 changed everything.” But in reality it is politicians who have changed everything, and in doing so, not made a better, safer America. Images: AFP/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition