On September 5, a group of runners left the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania carrying a baton. Over seven days they have moved it 565 miles across seven states and the District of Columbia, through the Pentagon Memorial, in 122 legs run firehouse to firehouse. This afternoon it arrives at the World Trade Center.

This is the Great American Relay, and this is my fifth year running it. Eclipse Community Management is proud to be a sponsor of the event this year. I am leading one of the final legs, beginning just north of Central Park and running south into lower Manhattan, arriving on the twenty fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

Why the relay ends where it does

The relay benefits the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which exists because of what one firefighter did on a morning he was not supposed to be working.

Stephen Siller had just finished his shift at Squad 1 in Brooklyn. He was on his way to play golf with his brothers when he heard over his scanner that a plane had hit the North Tower. He turned around, went back to the firehouse for his gear, and drove toward the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. The tunnel had already been closed for security. So he strapped sixty pounds of gear to his back and ran through it on foot toward the towers, where he gave up his life saving others. He was thirty four. He left a wife and five children.

His brother Frank and the rest of the Siller family built a foundation around that last run. The first Tunnel to Towers run was held in 2002. As of this year the foundation reports having delivered more than 2,000 mortgage free homes and committed over a billion dollars to that work.

Today the foundation delivers mortgage free homes to Gold Star families and to the families of first responders who died in the line of duty or from 9/11 related illness, in both cases where young children are left behind. It builds specially adapted smart homes for veterans and first responders who were catastrophically injured serving. And it has taken on the goal of eradicating veteran homelessness nationwide, in its own words because no veteran should live on the streets of the nation they signed up to protect.

The numbers, and the ones that came after

2,977 people were killed on September 11, 2001. Three hundred forty three of them were members of the New York City Fire Department. It remains the largest single day loss of emergency responders in American history.

That second number is the one people know. It is also the one that is no longer complete. The FDNY has since lost more than four hundred additional members to World Trade Center related illness, and names are still being added to that wall. The people who went into those buildings, and the people who spent months on the pile afterward, are still dying of that day.

I spent years in the fire service before I started this company. I never worked a scene remotely like that one and I would not pretend otherwise. But I know what it is to put on gear and walk toward something everyone else is walking away from, and I know the culture that produces a man who parks his car and runs into a tunnel because that is where the work is. Running those last miles into lower Manhattan in memory of the 2,977 lost that day is not something I take lightly. Participating in this relay is something I look forward to every year.

What actually stayed with me

September 11 was a tragedy, and there is no way to write about it that makes it anything else.

But the stories that came out of it afterward are what have always stuck with me. Not the attack. What followed it. People stood in line for hours to give blood. Firefighters drove in from other states without being asked. Strangers walked each other home across bridges. For a stretch of weeks, a country that argues about nearly everything remembered that the things uniting Americans will always be stronger than any that divide us. We wrote about that here once already, on a different kind of hard day, and it is still the thing I believe most firmly.

That spirit does not maintain itself. It has to be kindled, deliberately, by people who decide to.

So here is the only thing I would ask of anyone reading this. Sometime today, do something kind for someone who did not earn it and cannot repay it. Buy a stranger’s groceries. Cover somebody’s meal. Help a neighbor with something they have been putting off. Pay off a school lunch account. Whatever moves you. Do not report it to anyone, do not post about it, and do not mention where the idea came from.

In the days after September 11, people took care of each other without being asked and without looking for credit. That is the part worth carrying forward. It is available to all of us, today, at no cost and on no schedule.

To the 2,977, to the 343, and to the more than four hundred who have died in the years since from what they breathed doing that work. We remember.