I volunteered at Ground Zero in the days after 9/11. A friend and I drove down to New York from Massachusetts where I lived and we served meals to firemen in a food tent near the still smoking, devastated site.

Restaurants in the area supplied trays of food to the tent all day long and people brought cases of water and soda. You might remember how the people of that city, the people of our country and the whole rest of the world, seemed to be doing what they could to help ease our collective pain.

One day, a policeman who had come through the tent a few times asked my friend and I if we wanted to see Ground Zero for ourselves – and at a time when virtually no one had access to the site beyond the city’s mayor and random politicians and tireless public safety teams.

I remember that when he asked us we immediately put down whatever we were doing and followed him without saying much, but we knew we were being given unique access to something tragic and historic – something few people would ever see and something we would never forget. We were aware that the scene would be etched into our dreams for the rest of our lives and become a part of our own story.

And I think we both wondered as we walked along why he had chosen us. This policeman, who was now our guide, was solemn and dutiful, but it was clear that he wanted us to see the site, wanted these two meal makers from the food tent to bear witness to something that he faced every day.

He led us up a street and through a police barricade and told us not to take any pictures and then we walked into Ground Zero – two young mothers from Massachusetts who hadn’t been doing anything special on Sept. 10.

To describe what we saw inside will always be impossible. Never have I been able to put it into words because there really are no words.

I can’t tell you exactly where we stood because it was impossible to discern. But I was standing in front of a restaurant that had lost its facade and the odd scene inside cast an eerie glow across the monumental cavern of wreckage.

There were plates of eggs still sitting on the restaurant’s tables – obviously abandoned quickly by patrons when the first plane struck. Coffee cups were placed around the table tops, napkins on chairs, newspapers left unread heralding a naive world that would no longer exist after that morning.

There were, of course, no lights on in the restaurant, but oddly a cooler full of soda still hummed in the corner, casting its own glow of radiant light across the floor.

In front of this restaurant with no front door and no front wall, was the wreckage of the two twin towers. I can’t quite describe it in a way that would enlighten you more – only pictures can do that. I could see rescue workers digging through the giant piles – but they looked so small, as if they were a million miles away. The scale of this disaster is what struck me most because you can’t imagine the enormity of the space without having been there. That’s one thing pictures can’t do. Space is something you have to feel.

The policeman who brought us there stood with us, but he now seems like an apparition to me – like a ghost from a Dicken’s novel who came to lead us to enlightenment and then later disappeared.

The site was everything you saw on TV and in pictures, but it was the feeling inside the site that I remember most. Not the twisted steel and the abandoned plates of eggs on the restaurant table – but the feeling. There was this heavy silence, but it wasn’t – at least to me – the silence of death but the silence of reverence.

It was reverence.

Even today – 15 years later – that reverence is what I carry as the remnants from that day, from that memory.

It’s a reverence for those who died, those who searched and rescued, those whose lives were touched so intimately by that tragedy.

And I still remember how small I felt standing among the piles of steel and dust and leaving with my head bowed but with an incredible feeling of hope.