Portraits of Grief

Christine Merser, September 11, 2025

It’s September 11th again, and like every year, I find myself replaying the day. I was in New York. I saw the first plane fly into the North Tower, and then the second. Standing with ten strangers after crossing the Triborough Bridge, we huddled together and watched the buildings fall. Every year I publish my story on my personal memoir column, but this morning, as I prepared to put it up, my mind wandered to what came after.

More than 3,000 souls were lost that day. The New York Times made a decision that shaped how we mourned them, that every single obituary would tell a story. Not just names, schools, or survivors. A story. Something to remind us who they were.

My friend, NR “Sonny” Kleinfeld, already a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, was assigned to what became known as the Portraits of Grief desk. He and the other journalists bore the weight of calling families, listening to their memories, and distilling entire lives into a few sentences that somehow made us feel as if we knew each person. It took a toll on them, but what they created was extraordinary. It ran for a year. More than 2,400 entries. Another Pulitzer.

I read every single one. Every profile. Every portrait. I wanted to remember them, all of them, not just collectively but individually. That mattered to me. It still does. The collective number never tells the story of the loss.

And this year, as I went to post my own memory, I thought about the numbers again, not the 3,000+ from 2001, but the growing numbers of immigrants being picked up off our streets today, disappearing into detention centers or worse. I read the statistics, but I don’t see the people. I don’t know their faces, their stories, their children, their dreams.

It makes me wonder. Maybe what we need now is another Portraits of Grief. Maybe there should be a website, a living archive, where families of the people taken can post a picture and a single story. Something human. Something to make them real to us. Because until they are individuals, it is too easy for us to look away.

On this day especially, I can’t stop thinking about how many immigrants were inside the towers. The kitchen staff serving breakfast at Windows on the World. The Irish firefighters rushing in knowing they might not come out. Visitors from other countries there for just one day. The World Trade Center was a microcosm of America itself, a tangle of accents, backgrounds, and beliefs, and when the towers fell, we mourned them all, together.

And it would be unfair not to note, on this day, that the only person who I remember publicly with something ugly was Donald Trump. You can look up what he said if you want to know. I had forgotten it until today because, back then, he wasn’t in the forefront of my mind. But reading it again, I realize he has always been who he is. We overlooked it then. That was a mistake. We cannot make the same mistake now.

But this isn’t about him. Not today. Today is about the people we lost, and about the danger of forgetting the humanity of the people we are losing now.

I know my team at Blue2Media (no, I haven’t asked) could build such a site. We could mirror what Sonny and his colleagues did twenty-three years ago, one story, one portrait, one life at a time. And maybe, if we remember their faces, we’ll find the will to act to save their lives.

For those who lost a loved one on 9/11, I think of you today, as I do every year. I know the years have passed, but your lives were interrupted in ways most of us can never fathom. I remind myself every September to live my own life fully — because of what they could have been, and because we still owe them that much.