This anniversary hits hard.

Missing friends, former colleagues hits hard.

Going to an event at FDNY headquarters recently, I stood in front of the memorial wall. The added names of first responders who have succumbed to a range of cancers and other chronic lung and soft-tissues illnesses hits especially hard.

At the Fire Department, we always honor the 343 members who died on the day, but all the extra deaths. The men and women of the Department who labored on the pile for weeks and months searching for the fallen have passed as well, leaving more families devastated by grief and sorrow.

With the release of about 170,000 9/11-related documents, New Yorkers feel a different kind of attack. Survivors and victims’ families spent over two decades in court to see those documents after one city administration after another failed to provide access. Before the 25th anniversary, the Mamdani administration has created a 9/11 document portal with search capabilities, the first to heed the call.

New Yorkers ask, why so long?

Why the added pain?

Why not tell us just how toxic the pile was? Or describe how particulates clung to our bronchial systems? Why not issue masks and gloves, knowing mere days after the collapse of the Twin Towers that the pile was a toxic soup? When anyone within a few-mile radius of the pile had the cough? Inhaled the damp fire smoke that lingered for months and months. Washed away the fine mist of ash that seeped in through the windows onto our furnishings, day after day after day, causing a special kind of ache knowing so many of our fellow New Yorkers had perished so horribly.

Every one of those days hit hard.

Going to funerals.

Feeling the gut punch on the R train on my way back to Brooklyn. I would forget for a moment and look out the subway window at Cortland Street, the World Trade Center stop, which was nothing more than an open, gaping wound with bits of blue sky visible through twisted beams and rubble. Or fighting back stinging tears when I walked past the pile and saw the plaintive photos of the fallen hastily taped to makeshift fencing. The notes asking if anyone had seen this woman or that man. The flowers. The old wilted ones and the new ones that kept coming. Soaked by rain. By weeping. By the pain of loss for our friends and family. For our neighbors and colleagues. For our city. For our sense of who we were. Feeling the overwhelming grief that the hole in the sky represented.

It’s still there for me. Every time I look west from the Brooklyn Promenade, or when I am downtown on Fulton Street and environs. I can walk near there now. Sort of. I go to the Apple Store at the Oculus – a ribbed structure with design elements that harken back to the original WTC building skin designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava in the shape of a dove. The museum, however, remains a no-go. As is the reflecting pool with all the names and the blue beams that cast their light into the night to commemorate the anniversary.

As I write, I hold the memory of Pete Mardikian and Andrew Fischer in my heart.

May the memory of all who have fallen be for a blessing.