I lost my wife on 9/11. Please let this 25th anniversary belong to the families

Twenty-five years ago, on September 11, 2001, my wife Grace was at her desk on the 105th floor of the North Tower.She was 29 years old.

She will always be 29 years old.Twenty-five years is long enough to learn that grief doesn't end.It learns your calendar.

Somewhere in early August it starts: the tightening, the bracing, the counting down to the morning I return to the place where Grace was taken from us.It’s there that I, along with every other family at Ground Zero, remember our own Grace.We remember how she was the kind of person the rest of us build our lives around without ever realizing it.

We remember how her last summer, her sister told us another baby was coming, and Grace hoped out loud for a girl.It was a girl, they named her Grace.

That little girl is twenty-four now, and everything she knows about her aunt is a story someone told her.In Grace's memorial guest book, a friend called her a brilliant light to everyone who knew her.

She was, and the world lost nearly three thousand lights that morning.Every one of them was somebody's Grace.9/11 MUSEUM CEO REFLECTS ON LASTING IMPACT OF TERROR ATTACKS AS AMERICA MARKS 250TH BIRTHDAYThe ceremony itself is the one mercy in it all.

The bell at 8:46.The silence.

The names, all 2,983 of them, read out loud by loved ones, for hours, until every single person is remembered.No speeches, no politicians at the microphone, just the names.

Whoever built it that way understood something: for one morning a year, the most famous piece of ground in America belongs to ordinary grieving people, and to no one else.That morning is getting harder to protect.Every year there are more cameras, more commentary, more people with something to say standing near people who came to mourn.

And this year, the twenty-fifth, the year it should be most sacred, the story is already not about the victims.It's about the mayor.For weeks now, the coverage of this anniversary has been an argument about the Mayor of New York City.

Whethe...