Here you are 20 years later talking to me - and I'm sure other media - about this painful experience that most of us just can't imagine going through. He certainly would have said goodbye to me, and he would have wanted to talk to his daughters. I think if he did think that he was going to die, he would have called his parents. He said, “You shouldn't have worried them.” And I don't think that he ever considered that he would not survive it. And I remember telling him that I had called his parents and his sisters and he scolded me. They were taking back the airplane, and everything would be OK. He was very adamant in our last phone call that he had put a plan together. He said, “I might be late, but I'll be home.” He said he would be home for dinner, right? And when he told me that he was going to do something, that everything would be OK and he was coming home that night, I had no reason to not believe him. And I kind of smile when I hear people say that, because there was absolutely nothing ordinary about Tom Burnett. I'll say this: They talked about how ordinary people were doing extraordinary things on that day. He said, “Don't worry, we're going to do something.” Was that in keeping with the man you knew and his character? He was convinced he could stop these hijackers. And yet in what he said and what he didn't say, there was a real sense that he thought he could do something. They are absolutely embedded in my mind, and the emotions that they invoke: the feeling of being connected with him on that airplane, the hopelessness that I felt in being able to help him and the emotion and the sorrow I felt when I realized that he had died. When you think back to that day, what comes back to you first and foremost? Your husband was one of those people living his life on a flight for business. It also really gives us an idea of people who were living their everyday life, yet they inspired the world to get up and do something and to make a difference. 11, as well as commemorate the lives that were lost, because it was an attack on our homeland, which most of us have not lived through. I think it's important to remember what happened on Sept. Why is it important to remember 9/11 20 years later? It’s been lightly edited for clarity and length. Burnett Bailey joined MPR News host Tom Crann Friday to remember her late husband.

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