A 9/11 Memorial Service is scheduled to be held at 2 p.n. Saturday at Warren County Memorial Park.

There’s been a memorial service on Sept. 11 every year since the one-year anniversary of the attacks.

It started as a small gathering but, since 2005, it’s been held at Warren County Memorial Park. For organizer Ruth Seebeck, the service “was just important to me to create a place for people to come together and remember and be united in this.”

That sense of unity continues on Saturday in Starbrick where the service will start at 2 p.m.

The event remembers the lives lost on 9/11 but also seeks to honor first responders in the community as well as the area’s veterans.

This year, a speech has been prepared by retired Navy Seal Sean Freitag. Seebeck said he was going to speak in person but has since been called to Ground Zero for the ceremony in New York City. Seebeck said Freitag’s mother will present his comments.

“It should be very interesting to hear what he has to say,” she said.

But above all, Saturday is a time to remember.

Seebeck highlighted all of the family events that the people who died on 9/11 never got to experience. She said she’s seen her daughter marry and have grandkids. “(There are) so many things I’ve been blessed to have (that) those people lost.”

She said that many of the 13 military personnel recently killed in Kabul would have minimal or no recollection of the day that spurred the presence in Afghanistan.

“Yet they were there doing their job and doing it well,” she added, noting that a special closing service will be part of Saturday’s event honoring those service personnel specifically.

She first got involved with the memorial service in 2006 after Bunky and Mary Froman held a small event at Soldiers & Sailors Park in Warren from 2002-05, she explained.

“I got involved because I had seen a flag field in a magazine,” she said. “That’s where the kernel started.”

Putting up the flags required a fundraising effort and Seebeck said “everybody in the community jumped on board.”

In addition to the flags that fly at the Warren County Memorial Park, the site is also the only one in the county that features a piece of steel from the wreckage of the World Trade Center towers.

Service

So after 20 years, why is it still important to hold a public memorial service? She highlighted the sense of unity in the wake of the attacks and said it’s “sad that it takes a tragedy to bring us together” but that it “seems to be the way things are right now.”

“Is Pearl Harbor still significant?” Seebeck asked. “Is the truth of our history still significant? (It is) important for the younger generation to understand what we’ve been through…. This is still the greatest nation that the earth has ever known with more freedom and more blessing than we can even comprehend and yet people just take it for granted.”