What comes to mind before any specific image of the day is the smell—acrid, intense, invasive, unique. A mix of incinerated steel, glass, concrete, paper, plastic, jet fuel, and, yes, human remains, criminally cremated at a thousand-plus degrees. The sphere-saturating reek would strike every sense and enter even the skin before the eyes could take in the scene and the mind seek to unwrap the wrong, the ruin, the aching loss, shrouded in the lethal plumes arcing over lower Manhattan on a sunny, suddenly glum Tuesday—a noxious flue forming from the once twice-tall Towers that was spread out now as a massive human pyre.

Such was the scene at the quickly designated Ground Zero 25 years ago—or, to shroud the day in the mists of time, a quarter of a century ago. For too many, the terror attacks do seem long in the past; so much of national and global import has happened since, and a whole generation-plus has moved from infancy to majority. An equivalent time period would be from the end of World War II to the first term of Richard Nixon, with the staid ’50s and revolutionary ’60s in between. Our older son was not quite 1-year-old when the planes plowed down the Towers; he turns 26 in late September, a college grad, a working man, walking in a different world.

Yet to us who lived in lower Manhattan, the sights, the sounds, the fear, the horror, the wrack and the reek of those days are always close by—just say 9/11 or September 11, or Ground Zero, or terror attack, and we are there in an instant, with images more immediate than memory and the smell rising in our nostrils.

But the recall is not universal. Moving our younger son out of his college dorm last spring, I chatted with another dad who had a “Choose Life” license plate on a big family car. “I wanted to get that, but they were out of stock at the DMV,” I told him, “so I went with a 9/11 memorial plate.” The dad, some 20 years younger than I, looked blankly for a long moment, so I added, “An image of the Twin Towers with the words, ‘Stop Terrorism.’” He caught on eventually, but I realized that simply saying “9/11” may not hit a sure nerve of recognition anymore.

We said back then, endlessly, “Never Forget.” Yet 9/11 seems to be among the events we as a people are not quite comfortable remembering these days. Perhaps this is because that day is closely associated with what even early supporters consider now a failed aftermath—the invasion of Iraq, the search for WMDs, the eight years of war and seemingly endless, repeated tours of duty of a volunteer military. The tragedy of 2,997 individuals in three locations who were killed that day, many of them first responders dying in heroic sacrifice, has become meshed in some way with the thousands more senseless-seeming deaths of young men and women engaged in a distant desert storm of roadside bombs and IEDs, launched by enemies dressed like ancient nomads yet strangely well-armed. They fought an asymmetrical war of attrition, and we, avid Americans out for blood and justice, stepped far too deep into a Middle East morass we had little preparation or stomach for in the end. It was as though our leaders had learned nothing from Vietnam, where we fought to an uncertain stalemate.

Memories of 9/11 are also distorted by inside-job conspiracy theories that take the focus off the evil hijackers to implicate government actors domestic and foreign. Such theories have been abetted by the unseemly infighting and indecision over how to replace the fallen towers, with developers changing plans from two buildings to one, dubbed the Freedom Tower, which itself fell short of the projected height until a spire was added to reach a symbolic 1,776 feet.

Living now a few miles from Marine Base Quantico in Virginia, my wife and I hear the nearby firing ranges booming with discharges from dozens of light and heavy guns, and see the ’copters flying just above the treetops in rescue drills, and wonder about our current Middle East engagement two decades after the last one. I walk our new development of 200 homes and see many DV (Disabled Veteran) license plates and Marine bumper stickers of brave men and women who have paid the often unseen wages of war.

Still, in my mind, 9/11 is unique, set apart from whatever followed, a world-historic event and attack on our homeland that stands as singular as the bombing of Pearl Harbor did for my parents. More Americans died on 9/11 than on the Day of Infamy, yet Pearl Harbor is not as clouded in the modern mind, because the US went on to crush the Japanese as well as the Nazis. Even the dropping of two atomic bombs, judged by many to be an immoral targeting of civilians and a civilization, does little to dim the overall view that America was on the right side of a just war against evil aggressors. Although I am far from alone in holding 9/11 close to heart, I think my witness vital and perhaps unique, along with many other equally unique wit-nesses who were touched on that day. I grew up six blocks from the World Trade Center, saw the buildings rise floor by floor, wholly unimpressed with the steel-and-glass architecture, yet transfixed by the size and symbolism. It was bold, brash and somewhat garish, as the city styled itself to be shortly before descending to near bankruptcy in the 1970s.

I saw Philippe Petit walk the highest wire between the towers, and George Willig scale its shiny, slippery sides. I covered the first Trade Center basement bombing in 1993 when I was a reporter for Catholic New York, and was living with my wife and our infant in an apartment with a full view of the buildings when the new day of infamy came in 2001. As I wrote in this journal at the time, and in other outlets since, the attack felt personal, a gut punch, an invasion of my neighborhood which few saw as a real dwelling place, swallowed up as it was in the canyons of skyscrapers and the hyperdrive of the Financial District. But to me it was still Old New York, the streets winding to the whims of former cow paths, the noble steeples of Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel rising higher in my mind than the Twin Towers’ antennas. On Sundays there was a choice of four walkable churches: St. Peter’s, the first Catholic parish of Manhattan, where St. Elizabeth Seton and Venerable Pierre Toussaint attended; St. James, where a sign on the parish school announced that the first Catholic candidate for president, Alfred E. Smith, received all his formal education there; Our Lady of Victory, the Wall Street parish with lunchtime Masses upstairs and down, and St. Andrew’s, built near the site where Cardinal Patrick Hayes was born. That was the neighborhood I saw attacked when the hijacked planes lowered their noses to suicide setting.

I knew well the first recorded casualty of 9/11, Fire Department chaplain Father Mychal Judge, whose lifeless body was carried two blocks by his brothers in uniform and laid in the sanctuary of St. Peter’s Church. Another Franciscan priest, Father Brian Jordan, who baptized my godson some years later, was a constant presence at the site and blessed the girders still standing as the Cross at Ground Zero.

To me, remembering 9/11 is more than the annual reading of the names of those who perished, as important as that event is in keeping alive an awareness of just who and what was lost. More even than the memorial pools within the marble perimeters etched with the victims’ names that mark the footprints of the two towers, again as vital as that indelible marker is. It is more than even memory, so central to cultural cohesion, the writing of his-tory, and the passing on of meaning to the next generation. In fact, the day lives in my DNA. Geneticists say that trauma, such as Ireland’s 19th century Great Hunger, is etched not just in the mind but in the genes for generations, causing physical effects. Evidence indicates that for decades after the potato famine, the Irish were shorter and less resilient than their forebears, a result not just of malnutrition but of damage to the gene pool. In such a way, too, I experience 9/11 (in the present tense) as a genetic disturbance, affecting memory, yes, but also hitting more to my core, to my identity. The reek and flame of the day run fresh in my blood.

How to respond? I pray. My wife—who had worked previously in the North Tower and saw the early flames from our apartment on the 17th floor—prays. Together, we pray. We tell stories too of the day to our older son, who breathed in the first toxic billows before he learned to walk. We inform our younger son, born in the aftermath yet more aware of the day than his peers. In appropriate settings, when the moment seems right, I talk about 9/11 with the sober insistence of one who has an umbilical cord extending through time and change over these 25 years. I feel a bit like the messengers to Job: “I alone have escaped to tell thee.”

Yet I am far from alone. There are families who lost loved ones who have far more wrenching, grieving, bone-basic stories. There will be memorials and solemn ceremonies and truth-telling and name reading at the 25th anniversary that will be watched, no doubt, by millions. We will bring all our stories, trauma and precious, altered DNA with us as we gather in common ritual, in person or virtually, around the Twin Towers footprint pools that seem to swallow tears, and say with forceful assurance, “Never Forget.”

And by God’s grace, “Never Again!”