Doug Mello found weddings to be especially tough. He could handle the first hour, give or take, but then the thought of never watching his son Chris dance with his bride would consume him and force him out of the room.This is why Mello despised the notion that “time heals all wounds.” Time failed a father of a young man who, 25 years ago Friday, was among the first victims of the mass murderers who turned airplanes into missiles aimed at American pillars of economic and military might.Mello’s boys, J.D. and Chris, were suburban New York football stars at Rye High and athletes at Princeton – J.D., the older son, was a member of a two-time NCAA championship lacrosse team, and Chris, a little undersized for Division I football, was a rugby man instead.The father loved talking about Chris’s toughness as Rye’s leading tackler and as a senior co-captain who helped carry his high school to a state championship game at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, where the Garnets lost to Caledonia-Mumford. Doug was prouder of that defeat than any victory that preceded it because, he said, Chris faced an opponent who had about 100 pounds on him “and he fought that sucker all day long.”As a 25-year-old analyst at a Boston venture firm, Chris had been taking boxing lessons – and impressing his trainer as a natural – in the weeks before he boarded American Airlines Flight 11, bound for Los Angeles, on Sept. 11, 2001. He told his girlfriend and childhood sweetheart, Kristy Walsh, that he got upgraded into business class because the flight wasn’t packed. Kristy told him he had a beautiful day to fly.Chris was sitting near three of the five hijackers who attacked passengers and crew and, at 8:46 a.m., flew the Boeing 767 into the north tower of the World Trade Center.Days after the catastrophe, Doug told me, “There’s no doubt in my mind Chris struggled with them. Psychiatrist friends have tried to rationalize that it was the first one, that they had no knowledge, that the pilots probably said to keep cool. But if my son had any inkling this was do or die, he definitely wouldn’t have sat there. It wouldn’t have even been a battle if they didn’t have knives.”The families of some victims of 9/11 find it difficult to take part in large ceremonies to honor the dead. (Kena Betancur / AFP via Getty Images)Photos of a smiling Chris loving life – here in a pirate’s costume, there in a Mets uniform – graced the Mello living room. A white envelope addressed to the Mello family and sent from American Airlines sat on the table.Doug and I kept in touch over the years, sometimes discussing his love for the Red Sox and, later, his disdain for the PGA Tour stars who took big Saudi money to play for LIV Golf. We spoke a lot about the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, an explosion that killed six, including a pregnant mother, injured more than a thousand and shook my wife’s office at Bankers Trust so violently that she thought the bomb went off inside her building.Doug was a phone company executive and worked that Trade Center site with compassion and integrity. With power out and trapped workers inside constantly calling loved ones, Doug refused official advice to cut the phone lines to save what appeared to be a collapsing system. He wasn’t severing the only lifeline those people had to their families.He met with federal agents after the ’93 bombing and did what he could to help cops, firefighters and displaced employees. “And the tragic irony of ironies,” Doug said more than eight years later, “is my son was killed at the World Trade Center.”But as he continued to wrestle with his anger and sadness until he died last year at 82, Doug always circled back to the one thing the terrorists stole from Chris that hurt him the most.“He would have been such a great father because he really loved kids,” Doug would say, “and they took that away from him.”Doug and his wife, Ellen, and their son J.D. and extended family members felt that pain every day since 9/11. When the nation mourns the nearly 3,000 victims in ceremonies to mark the 25th anniversary (Is that even an appropriate word?), the families will be dealing with their unfathomable loss for the 9,131st consecutive day.