I debated a lot about what to do today.

Should I vlog about how Rafael's first day of kindergarten went Wednesday?

How about daddy being away for several days for the first time in the boys' lives?

What about making new friends? Homework?

Everything just rang hollow to me.

Today is Sept. 11, 2009, eight years to the day after, well, you know.

I'm a New Yorker, born and bred. I still remember in the first grade when Melissa Klein's parents took the two of us to the brand-spanking-new World Trade Center and Ellis Island for the day. It was so exciting to see the city from atop the then-tallest buildings in the world.

We lived outside of New York, best city anywhere.

The towers were a symbol of that.

Even when the Sears Tower went up. And then other buildings elsewhere in the world took on the title of "World's Tallest Building," it didn't matter. We had the World Trade Center. WORLD Trade Center, you hear that, SEARS Tower? Suck on it.

My mom grew up in Brooklyn and always thought the towers were ugly. Lots of New Yorkers hated them, but in the way that New Yorkers hate things. Faced with anyone from elsewhere who complimented them, these folks would have disparaged them, said how ugly they were, how they were a blight on a gorgeous skyline, how they never should have been built. Of course, if faced with someone who said the same thing but were from, say, Kansas, the same New Yorker would immediately rush to the towers' defense and find something nice to say about them.

I feel their absence every time I drive into the city, or even just see lower Manhattan.

See, it's almost easier for me to mourn the buildings than it is to mourn the people. Because it was just three buildings at the WTC site that collapsed (yeah, a third collapsed hours later, but everyone just remembers the two big ones). Whereas about 3,000 people lost their lives that day and countless thousands of others lost fathers, mothers, daughters, sons and other loved ones.

I worked in a newspaper newsroom at the time, and we worked countless hours for weeks to try to properly memorialize everyone from our area and many who weren't who were killed. On that first day, I answered the phone and spoke to an older gentleman who couldn't reach his son. Did we know anything, he asked me. At the time, no names of the fallen had been released. All I could do was take his name and number and promise to call him if I heard, either way about Jon Albert of Upper Nyack.

Eight years ago and I still remember his name, where he was from, even the proper spelling of his first name.

The weird thing is, I can't even really remember the names of the people I knew, either first- or second-hand, who were killed that day.

Several people I went to high school with died. The older brother of one classmate, who was a firefighter. The husband of my mom's best friend's daughter, also a firefighter. Classmates who worked in various financial services firms. None were people I'd kept in touch with or could truly claim to "know," except that our paths had crossed at some point in our lives. I didn't live through the absolute devastation so many others lived through, so I latched onto that hole in the skyline.

One of my reporters was at the towers when they came down. She lived in the city, and before we even really knew what had happened, dispatched her to the scene. She saw as people jumped to their deaths. For months afterward, she flinched every time she saw a bird.

The horror of that day will never really leave us, and that's why I did this vlog back in June, when my son asked about the towers as we drove to Liberty State Park, across the water from where the Towers once stood.

I almost didn't repost this, because our site is, perhaps, a bit too young to be recycling content. But we promise you this is an exception, and maybe, just maybe, someone else will be able to use our example when they have to explain some tragedy to their young children.

After you watch - again, if you caught it the first time around - please tell us in the comments, if you can, where you were eight years ago when you heard the news and how it has affected you. We can all learn from one another at times like these.