Care was taken to honor the dictates of human dignity among the carnage. "If we found a human remain," he says, "we put it on a gurney, we covered it with a flag, and we ceremoniously carried it out." The work went on and on and on. "They were finding remains up to the point we scooped the last bit of dirt up in June 2002," he says.
The remains were sent to the city's medical examiner's office, where a heroic effort was undertaken to identify as many of them as possible. Initially, the office thought it would only analyze remains the size of a thumb or larger, but it ended up analyzing smaller parts too. It has stretched the limits of science, attempting to tease fragile DNA clues from decomposed shards of bone.
The identifications have slowed considerably, but one was made as recently as Aug. 31, and five total were made in August. Each is a small moral victory, a triumph of respect for individuality in the face of indiscriminate murder. All the remains are being preserved for the day when technological advances will make more identifications possible. Eventually, they will be removed from the examiner's makeshift site -- which includes a room where families can grieve and pray -- and taken to the official 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero.
For now, a mostly unremarked memorial sits in the city's midst, three years later. 19,915. 9,429. 10,486.