To say that we remember or commemorate the tragic events of two years ago tomorrow is to imply that we’ve somehow forgotten them.

But of course we haven’t. To remember the immense sadness of Sept. 11, 2001, takes but the slightest daily effort to notice the undeniable joy, evil, and absurdity of life on this planet.

Every breath taken by a loved one is a reminder of what we lost — what was taken from us — that day by those murderous thugs. It doesn’t take an act of mental decathlete gymnastica to appreciate the simple fact of a life’s rippling value and the searing pain of its absence.

Multiply it 3,000 times and more. Multiply that by the number nearly lost, the could-have lost, the similarly lost in the past and the ones who will be so lost in the future in every murder, every war, every dictatorship and we begin to approach the throat-swelling effect of the memory of Sept. 11, 2001.

What we can do is confuse the matter with something other than grief. We can use the dead to sell a car alarm, a gas mask, an insurance policy, a charity, a law, a war.

We can. We obviously have. It’s human nature to react to horror with every emotion but the one it so obviously demands. It’s human nature to splash the water to stop it from rippling its small, slow waves that eventually encircle us all.