Since November, I have helped write Portraits of Grief, the short stories about victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. I have written 121 of them at last count. During a shift that starts in the early evening and goes until about 2 a.m., I call survivors, write e-mails to friends of victims and look on the Internet for obituaries. Then I write less than a double-spaced page about each person.

The work has humbled me. By definition, writers have to think that our point of view is worthy of an audience. We get to say what life is like. We have our egos, our well-educated co-workers, our preferences for the underdog. Some of us might feel a little bit more interesting than strollers at the mall.

But these victims are outside our usual rounds. These stories are not ours to tell. We are confronted with very surprising glimpses of average people who would not likely ever appear in our pages if the planes hadn't fallen from the sky. The survivors told us things we didn't know. We couldn't say "I understand." They told me about the woman who went way out of her way to hug her favorite racehorse, the flight attendant who laughed in her sleep. People with job titles that I might not consider interesting, say in finance or insurance, turned out to be people I wish I had met.

I came to suspect that one person may not be more interesting than another. Maybe we are all equally fascinating.

I saw how some parents don't really know their children that well. Two fathers spoke about their children being good and kind and perfect but did not give me the specifics I needed to write a portrait that did them justice. I dreaded talking to mothers, and I avoided it, until one told me how she felt left out when no one asked her about her daughter.

I learned that there are many men who called their wives from work, as soon as they got in, every day. I learned that, based on posthumous self-reporting, there were a lot of truly happy marriages out there, a husband who offered to deliver his pregnant wife's daily urine sample to the doctor, so she could stay home and rest, one who vacuumed dog hair in the kitchen to relax after work.

There were a few revelations that were too personal to include: the younger brother who used to put boogers in his sister's bed, for instance. One widow wrote me an e-mail about how she is lost without her soulmate. It seemed too sad to print her conclusion: "What is it they say during the wedding vows... where two shall become one? Well, I am no longer one."

I was challenged by the similarities of the victims, and sometimes I became sad when I realized how grinding and boring grief is, how easy it is to sink into cliche: He would do anything for you. Everyone who met her became her friend. He put his family first. She had a dry sense of humor. Many people talked about how their deceased loved ones were always smiling, especially in photos. But that's the instruction: smile! The process taught me much about the commonalities, what we all aspire to, when we honor a person.

I wondered how it felt to the survivors to see their person's life as journalism. I don't know if I'd like to see myself distilled down into the conventions of my craft, which so often falls short of literature. What 200 words would someone use to describe me or my loved ones?

I welled up at a friend's wedding when I thought of all the colleagues of victims I had spoken to, who said, in disbelief, "I danced at his wedding." I worried about my newlywed friends in their vulnerable joy. And I thought carefully after a childhood buddy of a victim suggested that everyone should write a eulogy for a living friend, to understand how much someone can mean to you.

I held up OK during 11 months of interviews. Once I dreamt I was depressed and thought it strange that my subconscious would have to tell me something so basic. Buying Father's Day cards was enough to make me cry, especially when cheerful music played in the background. Sometimes, after a hard interview, I would get up and announce I would no longer do these stories, but few people were around to hold me to it. When I felt the need, I took a week or so off to work on other stories.

With each interview, I learned a new version of sadness. I remember hearing "Danny Boy" soon after Sept. 11. I cried, then multiplied my tangential sadness by a thousand, because it was only empathy, not real loss. And I multiplied that by almost 3,000, one for each victim, and then by 20, because each person probably had that many people who were crushed by the loss. That's 60 million times the sadness that I felt, times how many years?

Tina Kelley is a reporter for The New York Times. If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own (850 words), contact Howard Altman, City Paper executive editor, 123 Chestnut St., third floor, Phila., PA 19106 or e-mail altman@citypaper.net.