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Steamboat Springs — Should we remember or try to forget? Eight years have closed over much of the physical rubble that terrorists left behind. The salve of forgetting has soothed our scars, dried our tears, quieted our fears. Why restart the pain?

And yet that concrete cavern in south Manhattan where two towers once stood, the grass-covered Pennsylvania meadow where brave men crashed their plane, those 184 smooth and silent benches in Virginia draw us like magnets, pull us backward in time to remember.

That day's wound went deep, not the clean cut of a surgeon's scalpel, easily stitched and easily healed, but rather like the tearing of flesh by a rusted saw, ragged, gaping and dirty.

Those who have experienced the death of someone loved and cherished know about the importance of what is left behind. Even in the easiest of passings into whatever lies beyond, the one who remains suffers from the absence of what had been before, with a friend, a partner, a parent or a child. Death brought on by unexpected trauma can bring despair that far exceeds the worst of physical pain. Worse, however, than such anguish as that would be the emptiness that remains when memory no longer exists, that blank spot which erases a person's presence, as when Alzheimer's takes over the body.

Living beings grow and develop together. One individual's reaction touches the other, building as time passes into an encrusted seam between them. The older and more layered the connection, the greater the pain upon separation. The more abrupt the wrenching apart, the stronger is the need for some kind of salve. Remembrance can bring solace but only when, and not until, the wound is cleansed of ugliness.

Remember or forget?

Reshaping memories into something that is clean and good becomes the task at hand. Holding onto what is left will honor the men, the women and the children who died on Sept. 11, 2001. For most of us, there was little or no personal relationship with the people who rode elevators to their offices that morning or with the firemen who answered their call to duty and climbed the steps to help evacuate the workers. We didn't know the 3-year-old girl whose name is the first we come to as we step across a line etched into the stone of the Pentagon Memorial. Nor had we met the man who quietly spoke the words aboard a plan, "Let's roll."

Nevertheless, to the terrorists who killed them, they represented all the rest of us, the Americans who love and enjoy freedom every day. We are what haters of that freedom sought to kill. We are part of what is left of them. We join their parents, childre, friends and the relations of relations, in an increasingly widening circle as reverberations of their absence spread from family to family, state to state, country to country. They are ours.

We keep them by sustaining the memory of who and what they were. We deflect the evil that caused their deaths by using it to bring about a renewal of the common bond that unites all Americans in something very, very good - the idea of a government that accepts majority rule while respecting the right of every individual within its jurisdiction to be the person he or she chooses to be. The monument we can build is the continuance of that idea.

We are the link to the future that would have been theirs. We owe them a future that will guarantee the freedom they enjoyed to descendants of the world they knew. Sept. 11, 2001. We must remember.