VOICES: PORTRAITS OF GRIEF
Amid So Much Death,
Celebrations of Life

BY BARBARA STEWART

In the four months since The New York Times began to run Portraits of Grief -- its profiles of the September 11 victims -- they have generated an extraordinary amount of attention and praise. New Yorkers tend to speak of them with a kind of awe, as if they were sacred writings. Many readers seem to regard the reporters who write them as heroic and the Times as noble and generous for providing space and paying the people creating and editing them. There have been letters calling the project "the Lord's work," and even offers of money to encourage the paper with its efforts. (The plan is to write profiles of all the approximately 3,000 victims whose families agree. The project should be more or less finished this month; it will be reproduced in book form with copies given to the families.)

Certainly, Portraits of Grief has been a major effort, involving scores of reporters and editors. A total of eight reporters, of whom I am one, write them full-time, half for one two-week period and half for the other. A full page or two of portraits runs every day, with fifteen short stories and fifteen small photos per page.

The first sign that the portraits were striking chords with readers were the invitations from morning news shows, asking reporters to talk about their experiences. National Public Radio interviewed Wendell Jamieson, who is editing the profiles, and Vanity Fair ran a full-page photo of the reporters and editors sitting in ergonomic chairs and looking intensely solemn, if not positively glum, in its December issue.

The tradition of running short profiles of the victims of disasters, like plane crashes and fires, is probably as old as newspapering. This fall, several newspapers in cities hard-hit by the attacks -- including The Washington Post, Newsday, and the Newark Star-Ledger -- have had brief obituaries of the September 11 victims from their areas.

But the portraits are not obituaries or brief biographies. They are something different -- impressionistic sketches, or, as one of the metropolitan editors who created them says, "little jewels." Like a quick caricature that captures a likeness, they are intimate tales that give an impression, an image, of a person. They skip most items required in standard obituaries: survivors, lists of colleges, degrees earned, jobs held, descriptions of newsworthy accomplishments.

The focus is on characteristics, like sweetness or a love of cozying up at home, or private passions, like shopping or paddleball. Or on quirks, idiosyncrasies or funny tales, like the one of a banker who stabbed his hand while fishing, trapping hook, hand, and fish together -- and who subsequently regaled friends with the tale at every opportunity.

While they are obviously meant to be accurate, they are clearly not objective. They are based on the highly colored recollections of family and friends, and are the kind of stories told at wakes and memorial services. Often the memories are sad, but none are embarrassing or mean-spirited. It is unlikely that all the victims have been honest and generous, but none has been described as a cheat or a skinflint. The information comes from the people who cared about them. Basically, the profiles are about love -- not the usual focus of a daily newspaper.

"Have fun with them," an editor said when I began. To people outside journalism, that might sound like an utterly perverse instruction. But they are fun in a way. As just about every reporter knows, interviewing people in extreme situations, including grief, tends to be intense, emotional, and highly interesting. It is wrenching when the person I am talking with is sobbing, which happens pretty often, but the stories they tell are fascinating. Gradually, I get a real sense of the person.

There was the Staten Island grandmother, a passionate shopper and a size eight, who wore a shiny gold raincoat and pink rhinestone glasses and pulled it off with panache. And a banker who spent every Saturday and Sunday morning playing paddleball. And a twenty-six-year-old trader from Cantor Fitzgerald -- the bond trading company that lost 700 of its 1,000 New York employees -- who thought up a memorable way to propose to his girlfriend. He would take her to the family cabin in the Adirondacks, take her for a spin on the lake and steer near the shore, where his sixteen nieces and nephews would be holding a big sign: "Will You Marry Me?"

There was a young trader who sent his younger brother in college two blank checks, writing: "Don't work. Study. And don't tell Dad I gave you this." And an immigrant salad-maker who barely managed to support his four children and mentally ill wife, and who loved being around his kids so much that his sister had to gently tell him that teenagers would rather spend weekends with their friends than go to the park with their father. And a twenty-three-year-old Chicago woman, recently engaged, on her first trip to New York. She arrived at night, on September 10, and got to the World Trade Center, where she had business, about 8:30 Tuesday morning.

The details emerge slowly, like a flat figure stepping into a third dimension. Initially, most people say pretty much the same thing: "X was wonderful. He was such a kind, good, smart person. We loved him so much." We start with ordinary things: What was she good at? What did she like to do when she wasn't working? Soon a thread dangles, and I pull. Mrs. Beekman called her husband a "family man." Sure, I thought, he and nearly all the other victims. But his love for children was so intense that he liked to slip away on weekend afternoons, and would be found at his sister's house nearby, stacking blocks with his two- and three-year-old nieces and nephews. Jean Andrucki, a Port Authority employee, liked sports, says her sister. Well, who doesn't? But Ms. Andrucki's sport was Gaelic football, an obscure Irish game, which she played with a team in the Bronx.

Nancy Morgenstern was an Orthodox Jew who liked to bicycle. In fact, she was a skilled racer who traveled to competitions throughout the Eastern seaboard, adhering strictly to Jewish tenets in towns that had never heard of kosher food. On Saturdays, she turned her cell phone off, stayed in her motel room, and ate the kosher tuna sandwiches she had brought.

The interviews usually last half an hour or so. At first they are formal, but soon become freewheeling and intimate. After ten minutes, we sound like old friends. Though a few people have not wanted a profile or have been too upset to be interviewed, the majority have been eager to talk about the people they loved. That contradicts the cliché of a reporter barging in on grieving families and bothering them with tactless questions. One woman said she got more out of talking about her husband to reporters from Newsday and the Times than from talking to her therapist.

Some families waited for weeks or months before agreeing to an interview because they were hoping their loved one was still alive -- knocked on the head by a piece of rubble and wandering around the city streets with amnesia.
For me, the early weeks were the hardest. The shock was fresh. "Missing" posters were everywhere, the air smelled bad, and I had personal memorial services to go to. The names in the Times queues, copied from posters and corporate, government, and media lists, kept increasing. I would glance around the newsroom, close my eyes to rest them, and when I looked back at the list I would only be up the L's. It felt as though death was everywhere.

The shock the reporters were feeling is hinted at in the September profiles. Most include details of the victims' final minutes, the number of the floor they were on, their desperate final cell phone calls. Soon, though, it became clear that the profiles should concentrate on people's lives, not their deaths.

My friends outside of journalism say the news is starting to pall on them. But the Portraits of Grief is not. Frequently, people say they read every profile, every day, or save them to read later. They follow the profiles religiously, in the literal sense, as if they are offering the grieving families the gift of their attention and unexpressed sympathy. Some people say the portraits upset them and they can only read two or three at a time. But nobody seems to ignore them. The profiles, they say, bring the grief home and make it real and touching. They turn an incomprehensibly vast tragedy into thousands of accessible tragedies -- individual and heartbreaking.

So far, I have written about seventy profiles. Listening to their families and friends describe them and their mutual love has changed the way I feel about the people of New York. Strangers in this crowded city often feel like nothing more than irritants and obstacles. They grab the empty train seat, elbow me on the sidewalk, talk in loud voices, and block my view of paintings at museums. Now, sometimes, when I am not too tired or in too sour a mood, I gaze at strangers on the train or in Times Square and think of them as people with full, rich stories. Writing the profiles is like getting to know some really interesting people and, at the same time, losing them. Or like going to a lively party filled with colorful guests, but getting there too late, after they have left. It makes me want to make more of an effort now, with living people, to be more open, to get to know them while we are all still here.

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