AM
With this, and this afternoon's reports, we end this series, at least temporarily. We do this because the geography of the larger story is changing.
We do not do this because the story of New York is at an end. That this city has healed in some ways cannot be questioned. That it may be decades, decades before the scars are no longer visible, also cannot be questioned.
This is a city where a fireman who retired a year ago said last night that of the 340 colleagues lost at the World Trade Center, he knew by sight, 185 of them.
And this is a city where this remarkable anecdote may summarize how much repair needs to be done.
The man was, like a huge percentage of her patients, from Wall Street. He confirmed what his therapist was guessing: that maybe half the firms there have yet to provide counselling. Then he asked a question that stunned her.
She swallowed her shock and walked him through the seemingly obvious: having the World Trade Center destroyed, five blocks from your own office, and having to run for your life, and losing friends and colleagues, and then having to march back to work past checkpoints and smoking rubble six days later was traumatic.
What was this patient's question? "Doctor? I feel this kind of depression. Where could this be coming from?"
PM
With this report we end this series, at least for now. For your sake and mine I hope we don't need to resume it.
It is probably the right time - as Winston Churchill put it, certainly not the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning.
That someone mailed anthrax to NBC's Tom Brokaw and his assistant became ill after she opened the envelope twelve days ago has sent another shudder through the city. That no other sicknesses were reported... that Rockefeller Center is as busy as usual... both need to be remembered.
So does this. In 45 minutes on September 11th, this city's bravest and finest, evacuated more souls safely than the British did on the first day of the escape from Dunkirk in 1940. This was history's worst terrorist attack event, yet at least three out of every four of its possible victims - got out, without a scratch.
And to you, take this from a hard-boiled native of these streets. Your thoughts, your support, have been felt here, and have helped us through, and will help us through. If I may be presumptuous enough to say this: Thank You.