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I’ve found it really hard to look at the pictures on this, the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

My stomach tightens when the images roll across the TV screen.

The experience has given me an insight into something I have sometimes struggled to understand: why survivors of World War II like my own parents spoke so little of those terrible days. In 1955, 10 years after the war ended, my grandparents arrived in Vancouver from Hungary as part of a family reunification program. They were greeted by their daughter’s young family. I was 2. My brother just a few years older.

My parents had fled in 1946, looking to make a new life. They arrived in Canada two years later. Together, we were a family in a new world.

When I got older, they talked occasionally of those dark days, but mostly they lay veiled in layers of dust.

Now I look back to 9/11, a time when I was editor of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and was buried by the images and stories. I can’t believe how much has happened since then, in just 10 years. Today I understand a little better how the present can keep its grip on you, how the years recede and how difficult it is to talk of terrible experiences.

At the end of 2001, I traveled to New York and visited Ground Zero in the dead of night.

This weekend, as we reflect on 9/11, I want to share the piece I wrote about that experience.

Because while we may find it difficult to speak of what we saw, it does not mean we do not remember.

AT GROUND ZERO, LIFE IS NORMAL YET UNFAMILIAR

Dec. 29, 2001

New York, New York.

There’s no city like it.

No city so full of life.

No city so full of dreams.

I have come here most every year for more than 20, usually to visit my wife’s family scattered across Brooklyn.

It’s a ritual that connects my children to cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and the big world outside Denver.

This year, barely more than 100 days after the attack that collapsed the World Trade Center, we are back.

The first time I glimpse the skyline my stomach tightens.

A sickening feeling of sadness.

Something is missing.

Arriving here now is like walking into your bedroom and finding everything gone, a black hole in the floor. The familiar somehow feels strangely unfamiliar. And it hurts.

Yet life goes on. The cabs line up. The sun shines.

Cars hurtle along the highways and through the tunnels.

My first glimpse of Ground Zero comes as we careen across the city a few blocks from the rubble.

A typical gritty street just stops – and there’s nothing but empty space.

Then it’s gone. The cab carries us away into streets teeming with life.

But I can’t get it out of my mind.

The hole. The huge void.

I am drawn by the need to visit the site, to pay my respects, to try to understand. I can’t get it out of my mind.

So after my children are in bed, my brother-in-law and I go together, in the dark of night.

In the day, the streets surrounding Ground Zero are crowded.

At night, a few figures scurry through the cold shadows. The bright lights shining on the debris set a scene you can only glimpse.

But the quiet of the night lets you hear your feelings.

We walk the entire perimeter. Past flowers on barricades. Signs of love from across the country. Cops sipping coffee.

We walk over temporary utility lines. And past darkened buildings.

You always hear that you can’t understand just from the pictures. That’s because they’re not three dimensional. You can’t picture the void. It is huge.

It’s a different reality.

It’s very difficult to see anything beyond the fences that wrap Ground Zero.

But standing outside them puts a feeling in your gut. I can’t describe it as anything but feeling sick.

Sick of heart.

The smell is like after a fire has been put out. The stench of wet ashes.

The most moving memorials are the small ones, tucked away from the crowds. Memorials where the faces of the lost firefighters stare back at you.

At one, a couple and their son look at the faces and what others have left to honor them. They struggle to find something they can offer. The man goes back to his truck and pulls the card from a memorial Mass from his rear-view mirror and places it among the tributes.

They have done their part.

It’s dark.

Few may know.

But their love touches a chord.

The void is huge. But each such small step defies its silence.

Flat-bed trucks rumble from the site, each bearing a few scraps of twisted steel.

The trucks follow a steady rhythm. Each driver carries just a few lengths of steel.

The drivers and the tourists, the cops and the mourners.

We remember those who are gone.

We go on living. Defiant.

We’ve got no choice, one security guard tells me.

We spoke at an exhibit of photographs from Sept. 11 at The New York Historical Society.

It’s packed, but almost silent. Who could talk among the images of destruction?

I ask her whether it was hard to spend all day in these two rooms of pictures.

She tells me, “No.”

That she had to go on. That’s what we need to do.

Her words seem to speak for the whole city.

For what’s truly amazing about New York this holiday season is how normal it is.

The place is hopping. It’s wonderful to abandon yourself to the flood of people thronging Times Square. If you’d been living in a cave since before Sept. 11 and landed among the lights today, you’d never know something horrific had happened a few dozen blocks away.

The billboards and video screens are flashier than ever. The crowds are gentler. Somehow the edge has been taken off this city.

The big city has become a small town.

In this sea of strangers, ask directions and you’ll get a smile. Stop and look up to take in the crazy scene and you don’t get any elbows in your back.

In fact, you might just hear somebody else saying what you’re thinking.

It’s incredible.

Nothing can stop this city.

Yes, the sorrow is overwhelming.

But life here is also so beautiful.

Together.