On Friday morning in lower Manhattan, relatives will walk onto a small stage and read names aloud. There are 2,983 of them, and the reading will take most of the morning. The ceremony stops seven times, at the minutes the planes struck and the buildings came down, at the minute the Pentagon was hit, at the minute Flight 93 came down in a Pennsylvania field, and then once more at the end, for the people who have died since of what they breathed in at the site. It has been done this way for years. It will be done this way again on the 25th anniversary.

I have no claim on this ceremony, but what holds me is the thing underneath it, which is administrative rather than solemn. The reading is possible because a list exists.

Somebody made that list. In the months after September 2001, people sat in rooms and decided who belonged on it. The passengers. The people in the offices. The firefighters. The six killed when the same site was bombed in 1993. There were arguments. Names were added and a few were taken off. It took years to settle. At the end of it the country had a document that said: these are our dead, this is the number, these are their names. And they are still working on it. The seventh silence exists because the dying did not stop in 2001, and somebody decided that those deaths belonged on the list........

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