The long, good deed is done. The last of the children of Marylanders killed on 9/11, a dozen boys and girls who received financial aid from Maryland Survivors Scholarship Fund, have graduated from college. Established in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks to help the grief-stricken families of victims, the fund closed shop last week.

Mission accomplished.

The long, good deed is done.

But there should be an accounting before the curator’s hand slides this story of generosity quietly into some small space in the 9/11 archives. If anything, it’s a reminder of how a national tragedy brought the good out of people, how Americans rallied for each other — even if it makes us wonder whether Americans could rally for each other today, across a political divide that grew wider and more bitter in the 22 years since the attacks.

Such an enormous event was 9/11, a sudden monsoon of horror and history, with global and generational ramifications. Amid all the fire and smoke, there were traumatized families — spouses suddenly widowed on a September morning, children suddenly without fathers or mothers — but there were also people who saw through the smoke. They saw those widowed spouses. They saw those fatherless, motherless children.

They saw a need. They stepped up to help.

In Maryland, they raised money for scholarships that, in time, filled the financial gaps that remained after payouts from insurance companies and compensation funds. The sons and daughters of men and women killed in the twin towers of the World Trade Center or at the Pentagon would need help — immediately or years down the line — to pay for their education after high school.

Twenty people volunteered to get the fund started.

And good thing someone thought of this, as the cost of a college degree soared to ridiculously high levels in the years after 9/11.

An executive order from Gov. Parris Glendening established the fund just a couple of months after the attacks.

Doug Schmidt, an investment banker from Towson, was the founding chair.

The children of Michelle Heidenberger were the first to benefit.

She was the senior flight attendant aboard Flight 77, the one that terrorists hijacked shortly after departure from Dulles and crashed into the Pentagon.

At the time, her daughter, Alison, was a 20-year-old senior at Loyola College (now Loyola University of Maryland). Michelle’s 14-year-old son, Thomas, was a freshman at Gonzaga College High School in Washington; he would head to Loyola in a few years and finish his undergraduate studies at the University of Scranton.

Michelle’s husband, Tom, suddenly a single parent, needed help. Money from the scholarship fund filled a hole in the family’s college finances. Without it, Heidenberger said, he would have had to sell his house or take out a second mortgage.

“It was a huge assist,” he recalled the other day. “For Alison, they paid for almost her entire senior year. And then, with Thomas, it definitely helped. … My children could not have graduated from the schools that they graduated from if it wasn’t for the Maryland Survivors Scholarship Fund. They would not be as successful as they are today, in their respective lives and careers, if it wasn’t for the [fund].”

Alison has had a career in commercial real estate and property management; Thomas works in the financial sector. They both are married with three children.

“Like all the children who lost parents on 9/11, obviously it was a traumatic thing,” Tom Heidenberger said. “But to try and go ahead with your life, especially if you’re a teenager, it was a daunting task, and I am very proud of my children.”

Twelve young Marylanders benefited from the scholarships, according to Ellen Frishberg, a board member who, at the time of the fund’s creation, was director of student financial aid at Johns Hopkins University.

“We created a list of possible current and future recipients from the details we had for the 56 Marylanders who died that day in 2001,” she wrote in an email. “We raised almost $400,000.”

“We only needed to help the dozen children who were not children of military or government employees,” Schmidt said, noting that survivors from those groups had other resources available to them. “The outpouring of contributions was exceptional and from the heart.”

For the next 22 years, the fund helped 9/11 families find ways to pay for higher education.

“Our fund provided ‘last dollar funding,’ after the colleges and state kicked in,” Frishberg said. “Even with average awards of $12,000 a year, we benefited from a robust stock market and the good work of the Baltimore Community Foundation, which managed the money and sent the checks. The funds held up for all who needed it.”

The last Marylanders to benefit from the fund were sisters, the children of a man from the Eastern Shore who was killed in the destruction of the World Trade Center. One girl was two years old, the other just months old, when their father died. They graduated from separate colleges in May. They both have set out to have careers in helping others. One is now a teacher, the other is working toward a degree in mental health counseling.

Last week, the fund’s leadership transferred the remaining $50,000 to the Maryland State Firemen’s Association. The money will go into the association’s scholarship fund.

The long, good deed is done.