It does get harder to sum up Sept. 11 as the years go by, and harder to remember what it felt like at the time.

Remembrance Day was taken, so they call this one Patriot Day. Human instinct, though, causes us to take these watershed moments and remember them. We fall back most easily to remembering where we were, what we were doing. If you were older than I was when Kennedy was shot, you remember where you were. Same for the Challenger explosion, and for 9/11. What’s perhaps more important is to take one step further into the memory bank and remember what it felt like, and take account of how far removed we are from that feeling now.

Remember how we didn't know whether this was the beginning of the end? We still don't, I suppose, but no longer with the same feel of impending doom. Remember how we suddenly quite clearly knew what patriotism meant? It's safe to say we don't have that shared sense of the word any more.

Because I'm a journalist and not a normal human being, I think I didn't have as many normal human being-like responses that day as I might otherwise have.

I was out for a run in South Burlington when the attacks happened. I was night metro editor at the time and hours from needing to be at work. A radio was playing at a house where a painter was working outside. I remember thinking that the radio sounded inordinately serious - more urgent than your typical mid-morning radio - and I wondered vaguely if some big news had happened. It was just idle speculation, though, because I couldn't hear the specifics, so I kept running. When I got back to the gym where I was a member, a couple of women were staring at the TVs in the locker room, talking about a plane crash and how it didn't sound like an accident.

I looked at the TV for a minute, then went into automatic mode. I needed to get to work. When I got to the Free Press, my job was to put together pages of local stories for the special edition we were putting out that morning. It was a frenzied task, and yet I was clumsy at it because it had been more than a year since I had done page layout. Amid my frenzied clumsiness, every now and then I looked up at the TV and more destruction was going on. I watched the second tower come down one second and was back to typing the next.

That's an odd way to absorb huge, emotional news. I didn't realize it until that night, sitting at home in front of the TV and having the whole story settle in. My husband commented that I hadn't reacted like the enormity of it had hit me. It had and it hadn't. I knew intellectually about the scope of the thing, but I had shut down the emotional enormity.

It may have been similar for others. Teachers who had to pretend in school like everything was going to be all right. Nurses and doctors in hospitals who had to go on with surgeries and regular-life emergencies. Emergency officials who had to think strictly logistically.

Whenever it is that you had a chance to let it all sink in – and to some degree it wouldn’t all sink in because it was too big - think back today to how you felt then. It seemed for a brief time that those feelings were not political, they were just human feelings. Was that bound not to last?

What did you do that day that reflected how you felt? Line up to give blood? (And have you gone back to give again?) Buy a flag? (And are you still flying it?)

There was a sense that everything changed that day. Did it? Or are most things really the same?

For what it’s worth, it seems like each of us shouldn’t forget what we felt.

— Terri Hallenbeck