On September 11, 2026, the United States marked 25 years since the attacks that killed 2,977 people in New York, at the Pentagon, and aboard United Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
At the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, family members gathered on the Memorial plaza to read aloud the names of those killed on September 11 and in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The program began at 8:30 a.m., with the first moment of silence at 8:46 a.m., when the first plane struck the North Tower.
There were seven moments of silence in all: for the times each tower was struck and each fell, for the attack on the Pentagon, for the crash of Flight 93, and to honor those who have died from 9/11-related illness and injury in the years since.
Who was there
Former Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden attended the ceremony at Ground Zero, along with Vice President JD Vance, New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. President Trump attended the ceremony at the Pentagon with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum attended the observance at the Flight 93 National Memorial.
The seventh silence
The first six moments of silence mark events that happened within a single morning. The seventh does not. It honors people who survived that day and died later, many of them first responders and recovery workers exposed at the site.
It is a quiet acknowledgement that the cost of that morning did not end when the morning did. For the families on that plaza, and for many who worked on the pile, it has been arriving for 25 years.
What reading the names asks of us
Reading every name takes hours. It would be faster to summarise, to show a number, to move on. The families read them anyway, one by one, every year.
There is something in that worth sitting with on a day like this. Remembrance is not a feeling that arrives on schedule. It is a practice people choose to keep, year after year, long after the cameras have moved on. Twenty-five years of showing up to say every name out loud is its own kind of strength.
Today is a day for remembering the people, not drawing lessons from them. But if there is one thing to carry out of it, it may be that: the things that matter most are kept alive by people who keep showing up for them.
Sources: National September 11 Memorial & Museum, CBS News.
