“We also have men who are willing to die for an idea.” – New York Journalist Katie Roiphe writing about those who laid down their lives over a year ago helping save friends, family, and strangers in New York, Washington D.C. and over Pennsylvania.

thoughts? I’ve got lots of ’em. None that I want to share right now. The cynical ones I don’t want to share out of respect for the dead. The profound ones aren’t that profound. So instead I’ll retread something I included in a post a year ago along with a picture I sketched of a man I saw in Canada, holding an American Flag standing over the QEW.

“There are moments in your life that make you, that set the course of who you’re gonna be. Sometimes they’re little, subtle moments, sometimes they’re not. Bottom line is, even if you see em coming, you’re not ready for the big moments. Nobody asked for their life to change, but it does. So what are we? Helpless puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come, you can’t help that, it’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you really are.”

Finally, Neil Gaiman, who has become one of my favorite authors over the course of the last year, wrote this short poem (reproduced here without authorization from Marvel Comic’s memorial Heroes… sorry Neil), to commemorate both the dead and the surviors:

The Song of the Lost

I’ll take the touch of his lips, she said

I’ll take the touch of his hair.

But all she has is photograph of an unsuspecting stare;

So she pins it up by the lampposts

And she tells herself he’s lost;

For this is the price of destruction;

— This is the hell of the cost.

We cannot forget our loved ones

We do not forget our friends

Till time itself be over and every friendship ends.

I will always hold on to hope, she says,

And never give in to despair.

But she misses the touch of his lips, his smile,

She misses the smell of his hair.

— Neil Gaiman, 2001