The azure sky over lower Manhattan on Saturday morning was eerily similar to the bright morning of Sept. 11, 2001, twenty years before. President Joe Biden stood in a crowd under the canopy of oak trees planted where the World Trade Center towers fell that day, looking up briefly as the sound of a jet engine broke the silence. A single commuter plane could be seen floating in a gap of sky between buildings.

The echoes from that deadly morning opened up old wounds for retired flight attendant Ronald Gillis, 56, who came to the memorial service held to remember his brother Rodney C. Gillis, a New York police sergeant who died trying to help evacuate people from Ground Zero. His brother was in his early thirties when he decided to leave his vehicle and head toward the attack zone. “He didn’t turn away from it,” Gillis says. “He knew he was coming down here. He knew he had to help people.” That, Gillis says, was just how his brother was.

As the nation grapples with a long and deadly pandemic, a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and a divisive political atmosphere, many who came to the ceremonies held on Saturday at the sites of the 9/11 attacks—in Manhattan, Shanksville, PA, and at the Pentagon in Virginia—were hoping to find some of the strength and solidarity that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy twenty years ago.