Did you lose anyone on September 11? My initial answer to that question would have to be no. After hours of panic on that horrific day, my friend Steve finally turned up at his sister's apartment on the Upper East Side, having walked from Century 21, where he had briefly sought shelter from flying debris and general chaos. Steve is one of a handful of dear friends and roughly 20 acquaintances of mine who worked within a several-block radius of what was the World Trade Center. When I received his call, sometime around 4 p.m., I cried for the second time that day. The first time was when I learned that the father of a friend of mine had been on one of the hijacked planes. As it turned out, four people I know lost parents and a close friend lost her best friend, though my inner circle of loved ones was left unscathed. If I had been a normal person, with a normal job at the time, these would have been the only names I recognized in memorials, such as "Portraits of Grief" in The New York Times. In the coming days, however, I was to realize that, as a result of my professional life, I might know the names and faces of many who perished.

Members of the Choral Union pictured at Ground Zero, under a cross made of two beams from one of the fallen towers.

On the morning of September 11, I was walking to work at the Office of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, where I served as a constituent liaison, responding to the various needs of New Yorkers. The preceding Friday, September 7, marked an orientation session for our fall interns, and my summer intern stopped by the office for a picture. Her visit was brief, for she had promised her father that she would have dinner with him, as she was leaving for school the following morning. I cannot help but think that that was the last time she saw him. She called me less than a week later to confirm that her father was, as I suspected, missing. His would be the only 9/11 funeral I would attend.

While the personal connection I had with this girl made the call all the more painful, hers was not unlike the calls our office received from countless people needing help in the wake of the disaster. As labor-related casework was one of the larger issues I tackled for the senator, the coming months would bring thousands of phone calls, letters, and faxes from constituents, desperate for money, work, and, more often than not, answers to questions that no one could definitively answer. Sadly, the easiest calls came from people who had simply lost their jobs because of the attacks; they were cake compared to the calls from people who had lost spouses, mothers, fathers, sons, or daughters. These people called regularly, some merely frustrated with the difficulty of filing for various forms of assistance, others still in shock, simply needing to talk or cry with someone. The range of their problems and stories were staggering: a widow with no family in the United States who was seven months pregnant when she lost her husband; a man who watched his partner die in front of him, having been hit in the head by a piece of falling debris, and was unable to collect any charity because he was gay. These are names and stories I will never forget. These people are the reason, when reading "Portraits of Grief," I recognized not just those five names, but more than 100.

It is one thing to have watched those towers come down repeatedly on television, and another thing to have looked up while crossing Fifth Avenue, only to witness the explosion as the second tower was hit.

September 12 was supposed to be my first day singing with the Juilliard Choral Union. What was supposed to be an outlet for my stress instead became the vehicle through which I would have an emotional connection with these events that was even deeper than the one I had at work. On Friday, September 14, the group's director Judy Clurman asked if I would join members of the Choral Union in a Shabbat service. Many artists—musicians, in particular—will wax poetic about the cathartic qualities of their work and I will now happily join their ranks, having gone through a series of performances beginning that night that would confirm that very sentiment. I call them "performances" for lack of a better term, but the experiences that we shared were not for an "audience" per se. They were little more than unspoken group therapy, and they were just what we needed. The following Wednesday, we met briefly before proceeding to the fire station on Amsterdam Avenue and 66th Street, which had lost 11 of the 12 men they had sent down to the World Trade Center. Only seconds into our quiet rendition of "America, the Beautiful," the majority of us were crying. I stopped singing at one point, and a firefighter hugged me and broke down, weeping, in my arms.

In late October, Judy called me again, asking if I would be part of a small group that was going to participate in the official memorial at Ground Zero. My work with FEMA had brought me near the site, but not even my employment with the federal government had given me access to Ground Zero. On the morning of the service, we were in one of the rehearsal rooms at the Metropolitan Opera. On any other day, we would have been giddy at the thought of being there—especially in the company of Renè Fleming, Andrea Bocelli, and Andrew Lloyd Webber—but the majority of us were more concerned with how we would react to what we were going to see. Just days earlier, I had spent hours at our Long Island office with a mother of two who was widowed; I wondered how many people would be there with whom I had spoken in recent days. The experience of being on the site, with the fires still burning behind us, is one that I cannot articulate. The camera lens gives you only the slightest sense of the devastation—and I dare not assume that I could do any better.

Seconds into our quiet rendition of 'America the Beautiful,' the majority of us were crying... A firefighter hugged me and broke down, weeping, in my arms.

When I took my job with Senator Clinton, it was understood that I would move back to Los Angeles in the spring or summer of 2002 for graduate school. Having lived in New York for six years at that point, I now was grappling with the idea of leaving the place I had come to know as home. One would think that the idea of leaving would become instantly appealing after 9/11, but the feeling was quite the opposite. As the move became all the more real, I became attached to the city in ways that I had not been before. After having been one of the cool, collected mother-figures in the wake of the disaster, I was suddenly unable to watch or read anything related to 9/11 without becoming hysterical. I panicked at the thought of leaving this city of remarkable people with whom I had shared a common experience that-really-no one outside of New York would be able to understand. It is one thing to have watched those towers come down repeatedly on television, and another thing to have looked up while crossing Fifth Avenue, only to witness the explosion as the second tower was hit.

My last experience with the Choral Union was four weeks before I was to depart, and it was the most moving experience I might ever have. Few people know that there were full Catholic Masses held every Sunday on the edge of the pit, under two steel beams from one of the towers that had broken off in the shape of a cross, with a twisted piece of metal from one of the hijacked planes wrapped around one side of it. We were asked to participate in the final Mass held at the site—a makeshift Father's Day service for fathers who had lost children there. From my work, I knew that many of the recovery workers fell into this category, compelled to be a part of the cleanup as a coping mechanism and (all too often, in the case of no recovered remains) needing to mourn and make something tangible of their loss.

This visit differed from the first, in that the fires were out and what had been a heap was now a hole, but the grief was ever present. During our sound check, a girl of no more than 7 or 8 years old, wearing a T-shirt with a picture of her father and donning his fireman's hat, stood several feet from me.

The tears I shed for New York did not end that day, but I would leave Ground Zero with a personal sense of closure relating specifically to these events. I left New York on July 1—and I eagerly anticipate returning to New York this month to sing Mozart's Requiem with the Choral Union on the first anniversary of the attacks.