NEW YORK ? Relatives of the Sept. 11 dead gathered Sunday at a transformed ground zero, the centerpiece of a day of mourning and remembrance around the nation and world to mark 10 years since the worst terrorist attack on American soil.
At the site of the World Trade Center, workers busily put the finishing touches on a memorial that was to open later in the morning for the families of the victims. One worker used a cloth to clean the bronze panels inscribed with their names.
The relatives ? some in solemn, black suits, others in fire department T-shirts ? crowded into a space in front of a podium where President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush were to deliver readings as part of the New York ceremony.
As the sun rose at the site, an American flag fluttered over six stories of the rising 1 World Trade Center. The sky was clear blue with scattered white clouds and a light breeze, not unlike the Tuesday morning 10 years ago.
Remembrances around the nation and world were planned to mark a decade of longing for loved ones lost in the attacks. Of sending sons, daughters, fathers and mothers off to war in foreign lands. Of redefining what safety means and worrying about another 9/11 ? or something even worse.
World marks 9/11 with reflection, prayers
Ten years has arrived. And with it, memories. Of that September morning, when terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and a fourth plane crashed into a field in rural western Pennsylvania. Of heroism and Samaritans and unthinkable fear. And of nearly 3,000 killed at the hands of a global terror network led by Osama bin Laden, himself now dead.
People across America planned to gather to pray at cathedrals in their greatest cities and to lay roses before fire stations in their smallest towns. Around the world, many others will do something similar because so much changed for them on that day, too.
Bells will toll. Americans will see new memorials in lower Manhattan, rural Pennsylvania and elsewhere, symbols of a resolve to remember and rebuild.
But much of the weight of this year's ceremonies lies in what will largely go unspoken. There's the anniversary's role in prompting Americans to consider how the attacks affected them and the larger world and the continuing struggle to understand 9/11's place in the lore of the nation.
"A lot's going on in the background," said Ken Foote, author of "Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy," examining the role that veneration of sites of death and disaster plays in modern life. "These anniversaries are particularly critical in figuring out what story to tell, in figuring out what this all means. It forces people to figure out what happened to us."
On Saturday in rural western Pennsylvania, more than 4,000 people began to tell the story again.
At the dedication of the Flight 93 National Memorial near the town of Shanksville, Bush and former President Bill Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden joined the families of the 40 passengers and crew aboard the jet who fought back against their hijackers.
"The moment America's democracy was under attack our citizens defied their captors by holding a vote," Bush said. Their choice cost them their lives.
The passengers and crew gave "the entire country an incalculable gift: They saved the Capitol from attack," an untold amount of lives and denied al Qaeda the symbolic victory of "smashing the center of American government," Clinton said.
They were "ordinary people given no time at all to decide and they did the right thing," he said.
"And 2,500 years from now, I hope and pray to God that people will still remember this."
The Pennsylvania memorial park is years from completion. But the dedication and a service to mark the 10th anniversary of the attacks are critical milestones, said Sally Ware, one of the volunteer "ambassadors" who has worked as a guide at the site since the disaster.
Ware, whose home was rocked when the jet crashed two miles away, recalled how hundreds of people flocked to the site in the days afterward to leave their own mementos and memorials. She began volunteering after finding one along the roadside ? a red rose placed atop a flight attendant's uniform.
"It really bothered me. I thought someone has to take care of this," said Ware, whose daughter is a flight attendant.
Source: http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~r/CBSNewsMain/~3/UkmVxM-N0JY/main20104435.shtml
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