Published: September 12, 2004

Relatives of the victims left tributes in a reflecting pool at the World Tra de Center site.

After the ceremonies ended at ground zero Friday at noon, two women embraced on the Church Street side of the fence surrounding the trade center site.

They gathered at a hole in the ground in Lower Manhattan, a lonely patch of earth in rural Pennsylvania and a spot near the healed breach in the seat of military power, the Pentagon. The crowds were smaller than in past years, the grief perhaps muffled a bit by the gauze that time weaves over raw wounds, as hundreds drew close to the sites of the worst terrorist attack in United States history yesterday to remember and mourn those lost three years earlier, on Sept. 11, 2001.

A few minutes before 8:46 a.m., the same moment the first plane hit the north tower, the families of those who died at the World Trade Center began to perform the choreographed rituals that three years of grief have worn into the memory of the day, a careful series of steps as familiar and formal as a waltz.

There was the stoic descent seven stories into the earth, perhaps for the last time as construction proceeds rapidly on the once-barren site; the four aching moments of silence to mark the impact of each plane and the collapse of each tower; and the recitation of 2,749 names, the melancholy tolling of church bells and the lonely echo of taps.

Yet the anniversary, falling for the first time on a weekend day - with soccer games, weddings, and the rest of life - accentuated how much time has passed. People at observances across the country and those simply going about their morning business reflected on a day seared in the national psyche, but edging toward the middle distance between current events and history, between gash and scar, between the fresh grief of a new tragedy and the solemn remembrance of heartbreak long past.

Standing on a sunny balcony overlooking ground zero, Gov. George E. Pataki said: "We are not going to forget. Sept. 11 is never going to become just another day."

Yet in many ways it was. As Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg asked the several hundred mourners at a private ceremony at the site's western edge to join him in the first moment of silence, squadrons of soccer-playing 6-year-olds squealed on a field a few blocks away, their parents cheering them on as they played the first games of the season. "A goal - way to go," one coach shouted over the faint sound of parents reading the names of their dead children.

Last year children read the names of their dead mothers and fathers, an act whose sorrow was leavened with the promise of growth and healing. This year mothers and fathers recited the names of their dead daughters and sons; grandparents named grandchildren.

"It has been said that a child who loses his parent is an orphan, a man who loses his wife is a widower, a woman who loses her husband is a widow," Mr. Bloomberg said as he introduced the three-hour litany of names. "There is no name for a parent who loses a child, for there are no words to describe this pain."

Voices quaking, parents and grandparents came in pairs to two lecterns to read the names of the dead, beginning with Josephine Acquaviva, whose son Paul, a 29-year-old vice president at a subsidiary of Cantor Fitzgerald, died at the trade center. Many parents struggled to utter their child's name; when her turn came, Maureen Santora - whose son Christopher, a 23-year-old firefighter, rushed to the trade center on Sept. 11 even though his shift was over - paused and choked back tears.

In keeping with past years, there were no speeches, only readings. Mr. Pataki quoted President Dwight D. Eisenhower: "There's no tragedy in life like the death of a child." Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani read President Abraham Lincoln's letter to a widow who was thought to have lost five sons in the Civil War.

Mourners descended to the bottom of the hole, weeping as they reached temporary pools of water at the center of each tower's footprint. By the time all the names had been read, flowers were piled so high that the pools overflowed, soaking but not smearing the names, inscriptions and notes that had been scrawled on their wooden sides.

The site was radically different from two years ago, when fierce winds swept up swirls of dust in an austere pit ringed with concrete. Yesterday, newly rebuilt PATH train tracks snaked across much of the footprint of the south tower; the cornerstone of the planned Freedom Tower sat near the northeast corner. Looming above was the rapidly rising frame of 7 World Trade Center.

At sunset, two powerful shafts of light rose from Lower Manhattan, temporarily restoring the silhouette of the fallen towers to the city's skyline. Several hundred people gathered last night on Church Street, along the eastern edge of the former site of the World Trade Center.

Mourners gathered across the city and the region, in firehouses to remember their fallen comrades, and in police precincts, where the fresh wound of two murdered detectives was felt, killed not in a terror attack but responding to the most banal of crimes, a domestic dispute, on Friday night. Former employees of Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the north tower, tossed a white rose into the Hudson River for each of their 73 colleagues who died.

In past years, Sept. 11 has been largely insulated from politics, but in this election season both presidential candidates used the anniversary to voice the grief of the victims' relatives and their commitment to prevent future attacks. In an unusual live broadcast of his Saturday radio address, President Bush vowed to fight terrorism on every front. "We will not relent until the terrorists who plot murder against our people are found and dealt with,'' he said.

Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, spoke in Boston at a memorial to the Massachusetts victims of the attacks, telling their survivors that Sept. 11 proved the durability of "the American spirit," which he said "leads us to defy those who would harm us, and affirm that freedom will win."

The candidates were not the only ones for whom the day took on a political cast. Huge antiwar signs hung in windows overlooking ground zero, and some New Yorkers said the anniversary had been improperly politicized. "I can't stand to relive it over and over," said Tanya Anthony, who lives in Battery Park City, complaining that the Republicans had exploited the attacks at their convention.

Three years on, some of the disputes surrounding the disaster have been settled. Most families have been compensated by the federal government, many with more than $1 million, and a design for a memorial has been selected. But the years have brought fresh wounds: the report of the 9/11 commission, with its scathing criticism of the nation's failure to prevent terror.

At Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, relatives of the fallen laid flowers at the graves and wept before a memorial near the Pentagon, where 184 people died. On the rural field in western Pennsylvania where one of the four hijacked airliners crashed, 1,500 people gathered to remember the 40 passengers and crew members who died there.

Hometown memorials were held across the region. In Chappaqua, N.Y., residents dedicated a Flag of Remembrance for the victims, and in Danbury, Conn., a memorial was unveiled at a city park. In Hoboken, N.J., about two dozen people marked the anniversary at a park overlooking Lower Manhattan, a much smaller gathering than previous years.

The crowds at the trade center site were also much smaller this year, and there was a new contingent: tourists who jostled to peer through the fences around the site. Haru Kanada of Japan traveled with a friend by bus from Washington as part of a cross-country trip.

"For me it's one sightseeing place," Mr. Kanada said. "I know it's a little bit rude, but I wanted to see."

For many, the pain was as fresh as it was three years ago. Anthony Clark, who had just driven up that morning from Newport News, Va., wore a button bearing a photo of his brother, Benjamin Keith Clark, who was killed in one of the towers.

"My family is trying to get past it." he said. "We're trying to have closure, but they keep coming up with remains. It's hard to find closure when they keep finding remains."

Reporting for this article was contributed by Colin Moynihan, Marc Santora, Michael Slackman and Paul von Zielbauer from New York, Ken Evans from Pennsylvania, John Holl from New Jersey and Glen Justice from Washington.