We have waded deep into an awkward stage of the mourning process.
In the window of my local Barnes & Noble you can see the many coffee-table books displayed, title upon glossy title, pulled together by the big news organizations - The New York Times, Reuters, CBS ...
Walking home, I pass a woman selling World Trade Center snow globes, in which a tiny firefighter and police officer stand in front of a tiny replica of the twin towers. When I shake one, reflective red, white, and blue flakes shower down.
Perhaps the strangest of all, because it assumes the very worst in both speaker and audience, the city's ground rules for its anniversary ceremonies include a recommendation against delivering a speech of one's own composition. Rather than take a chance on self-dealing or inauthenticity, we accept, for a day, a kind of gag order.
Most people I know have little trouble finding their own terms and looking past the hype. We know - in gut-level terms, anyway - what makes sense and what does not.
In many ways the attacks were aimed at work, and the process of thinking about them remains all wrapped up in work and in people's ideas about work.
Plenty of people, as far as I can tell, really believe all that stuff about getting back to business and not letting the terrorists win by breaking our routines.
On CNN the other day, I saw a forensic anthropologist who, after sustaining injuries in the initial collapse, was back on the job the next day to join in the extensive project of identifying the dead. The woman, the only anthropologist employed by the New York City Medical Examiner, said she felt compelled to return. "I wanted to help my office," she explained.
I still have in my memory the mother of a dead Cantor Fitzgerald trader: Looking into the TV cameras late last year, going over it all for the hundredth time, it seemed, she said with anguish: "I sent my son to work that day, not to war."
And there have been all the firefighters and police officers who routinely, and with determined modesty, always manage to say of their colleagues - dead or alive, whatever the particulars - that they were doing their jobs.
The Pentagon and the World Trade Center were the country's centers and symbols of defense and global finance, but before the attacks, the buildings were also something else: The largest concentrations of office space in the world. And they were assaulted just as rush hour was winding down.
Though the ephemeral detail of this tragedy has been piling up for a year - at a staggering rate, in print and video and dinner table conversations everywhere - the dominant images remain for me: briefcases and business suits covered with white dust, cellular telephones, memos and invoices fluttering down against the famous clear blue sky.
The turning points that we heard dramatized were such momentous decisions as whether to stay at a desk and continue to trade in a gyrating market ... whether to miss a morning meeting in order to escort a child to his first day of school ... whether to collect one's thoughts in a concourse cafe before walking into a job interview.
To be sure, there are and will continue to be many other, surely better, ways to frame the tragedy.
I doubt many of my colleagues can look out our downtown building's north-facing windows, through which some of us observed Sept. 11's unfolding devastation, without remembering. For all of us it may have started at or near to work, but it goes far beyond that now.
Yet, for this editor anyway, it keeps coming back to work.
For a while afterward, going to work was harder. Then it helped us regain our balance. Eventually, our quiet, sometimes fearful commutes morphed into a way of mourning. Sitting quietly on the subway and worrying about anthrax and nerve gas were better than anything we could find on TV.
In the newspaper business, many organizations based downtown were confronted with limitations on our ability to do our jobs well - even as we wanted to do them better than ever. Newspaper staffs, including this one's, were ousted from their offices and struggled to get their editions out for weeks after.
A guy I knew, the editor of Waters magazine, died doing, basically, what every good trade reporter must - talking up sources at industry conferences. This one happened to take place over breakfast at Windows on the World.
He was working. And we miss all of these working people. Even more, and more broadly, we hate their loss.
Our colleagues in financial publishing at Risk/Waters Group. Our friends and sources at Sandler O'Neill and Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. Our eleven Thomson co-workers. And so many others we, as financial reporters, interacted with on a daily basis.
I have no doubt that this is a limited, maybe narrow, perspective.
But it makes it worse somehow that 3,000 people won't be getting out of bed anymore, suiting up, and taking a train down to work. It's sad that their families and friends - and the roughly 300 who were injured, and their families and their friends - have had these big chunks of their optimism taken away.
Which is why it's fitting that we, for a while to come, remember them as we return each year from our Labor Day getaways to beautiful late-summer days, as we embark on our daily commutes, as we buzz through our Rolodexes and come upon their cards.
