Many of the thousand people who gathered at Ground Zero in New York on Sunday were there for the 15th time — and even though a decade and a half has passed since the Sept. 11 attacks, many say the grief and the feeling of horror that befell the country that day will linger forever.
"It doesn't get easier. The grief never goes away. You don't move forward — it always stays with you," Tom Acquaviva, of Wayne, New Jersey, who lost his son Paul Acquaviva, said at the annual 9/11 memorial service at Ground Zero in New York.
Andrew Card, who was President George W. Bush's chief of staff on Sept. 11, 2001 and was responsible for delivering the news of the attacks to the president, was also inevitably forever affected, but he acknowledges that the lives of each and every person was altered that day.
"That day changed all of us,"
Card told NBC News. "It changed America. And it changed the world."
Granvilette Kestenbaum, who lost her astrophysicist husband, Howard Kestenbaum in the attacks, said during the New York memorial Sunday that while the nation and world so often feel divided, the shared sense of a day that touched everyone still unites people of different religions, political beliefs, and nationalities.
"The things we think separate us really don't. We're all part of this one Earth in this vast universe," Kestenbaum said. "We're all ordinary, and we're all special, we're all connected. We waste precious time by thinking otherwise."
James Johnson, a retired New York City police sergeant, who worked on the rescue and recovery efforts in early 2002, said he feels the yearning for closure is what binds everyone who can remember the attacks.
"I've got mixed emotions, but I'm still kind of numb," he said at the memorial. "I think everyone needs closure, and this is my time to have closure."
