N THE PUBLIC record of Sept. 11, 2001, grief bears two faces. One is that of the young suburban widow, soldiering through her sorrow for the sake of her children. The other is the male firefighter weeping for fallen colleagues.
Widows and firefighters are far from the only mourners of Sept. 11, but they have become the archetypal ones, perhaps because their stories recall a familiar narrative of war: lost soldiers, shell-shocked veterans, grieving war widows. The grievers, in this tableau, are women, and the heroes are men. It's a dichotomy that may have applied (though imperfectly) to another era's battlefields overseas. But it seems intuitively ill-suited to the inhabitants of contemporary New York.
Where are the husbands who lost wives on Sept. 11? Is their grief less heart-rending? And where are the women heroes, like the flight attendants who rushed hijackers on American Airlines flight 93, or Moira Smith, the New York City police officer who died evacuating hundreds of others from the World Trade Center lobby?