Last Sept. 11, Mr. Mayo, 46, was killed while helping to evacuate the World Trade Center. In November, Janny Scott, a reporter with The New York Times, wrote about him in Portraits of Grief, a massive daily series of biographical sketches the paper began shortly after the attacks.

After the portrait ran, Ms. Scott received dozens of phone calls from members of the public who were moved to purchase Giants tickets for Mr. Mayo's widow and her son. A couple of the team owners called to offer the use of their corporate boxes. Late last year, Corbin Mayo finally saw his first Giants game, touring the team's clubhouse and meeting his football idols - without his father by his side.

"I've always had a feeling that you want to be a journalist because you want to make a difference, in one way or another, whether you want to change laws or you want to move people," Ms. Scott says.

"All too often in your career, you're not seeming to make much of a difference. This was just a mind-bending experience of feeling like what you're doing was actually making a difference. I mean, I have never experienced anything like the response to this thing. And I'm sure I never will again."

Journalists spend their careers afflicting the comfortable, but they don't often get the opportunity to comfort the afflicted. Last fall, in the long week after the attack, reporters and editors at The New York Times grappled with the need to write meaningfully about the thousands of victims, even while rescue efforts were still under way. In the process, they groped their way to Portraits of Grief. Since Sept. 15 when the first portraits appeared, 160 writers have contributed more than 2,000 of the small 200-word obits. Through Dec. 31, an average of 12 to 15 profiles ran each day, soothing a grieving community, giving voice to the dead, and provoking a million tears at breakfast tables around the country and Canada. They will continue to run on a bi-weekly basis for as long as there are stories that remain to be told.

The sketches were different than traditional obituaries. They sought to highlight the essence of a person rather than his or her professional accomplishments. Because they had no interest in the usual measures of a man - his rank on the corporate ladder, his contribution to the wider community - their hallmark was the kind of democracy to which the United States aspires, but rarely achieves. If not equal in life, the victims were equal in death.

Portraits of Grief was a primary anchor of A Nation Challenged, the special daily section published until Dec. 31 to address the attacks and ensuing military engagements. The profiles proved so popular that the Times issued the first 1,900 or so in book format. In the spring, A Nation Challenged won a Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism.

"It sort of emerged in the first week as a solution to a kind of journalistic problem," recalls John Landman, the editor of the Metro section of the Times. "That problem was: We couldn't write about victims in the first few days, be-cause we didn't know who they were, how many there were, where they were from, what the configuration was - hardly anything."

No official lists of the dead or missing were available, leaving reporters intensely frustrated. "In many ways, this was the most important part of the story, and in all of the acres of copy we ran, we couldn't deal with it in any decent way," Mr. Landman says.

On the morning of Friday, Sept. 14, Ms. Scott, a Metro reporter who had been assigned to write about the victims, blurted out that she couldn't wait any longer for an official list, that they just had to start writing something. (As it happens, the city wouldn't issue an official list of the approximately 2,800 victims until August, 2002.) At the time, it was thought the number of victims might reach 6,000.

Conventional obituaries would have been prohibitively long, so editor Christine Kay suggested that the writers focus on a single anecdote that would be emblematic of a person's life and limit the profiles to about 200 words.

A handful of reporters convened for a 10-minute conversation, clutching dozens of the homemade missing posters that had sprung up around the city. "We just handed them out like playing cards and repaired to our desks and started calling," Ms. Scott recalls.

They also worked from employee lists of companies like Cantor Fitzgerald, the brokerage firm at the top of Tower One. Frequently, the only phone number they had ended up belonging to the victim. They would listen to the outgoing message, then hear that the voice-mail box was full.

But they persisted, tracking down other numbers for relatives and friends, speaking with five or six or 10 of them to get a full impression of the victim. Conversation often stretched well beyond an hour. "The level of emotion was so high that you don't cut somebody off and say, `Sorry, I've got enough, go away,' " Mr. Landman says.

In those early days especially, there was a terrible sense of interruption embodied in the prose. Helen Crossin-Kittle, 34, who was five months pregnant and had gone for amniocentesis nine days before the attack, was expecting the result the following week. The portrait concludes like this: "[Her husband] and the couple's families have not decided whether they want to be told whether she was expecting a boy or a girl."

Though the reporters now say they were trying to draw a picture of a community as it was on Sept. 10, before the world changed, some of them clearly were trying to work through the horrors of the event for themselves. On Sept. 15, the day the profiles first ran, a sketch of one woman who worked in accounts receivable at Windows on the World described the desperate phone calls she made to her grandmother and mother after the plane hit the tower.

"In those first weeks, I think we were all insane," admits Glenn Collins, who wrote 48 portraits. Ms. Scott adds, "We were bleary-eyed and incredibly emotionally raw. You're talking to people who were in exactly that same state, and you may be the first stranger that has gotten hold of them and asked them to do this." She wrote about 50 portraits.

"We were weeping on the phone with complete strangers," she continues. "It was like being in a dark room, unable to see the face of the person you're talking to, and they're telling you these incredible stories, and they're mustering this impressive courage. And then you're going home, getting a few hours of sleep, trying to keep your family life in order, and at the same time you're weighing all of this panic, wondering, `Am I supposed to stay in New York? Am I supposed to raise my children here after all? What am I supposed to do?' It was just a really scary, strange period."

That strangeness extended to the experience of reading Portraits. Part of their emotional wallop came from finding such intimate and colloquial writing in a newspaper that normally wears such a restrained face. In that sense, the portraits were a metaphor for New York itself, a city with a tough exterior that, having suffered a critical blow, briefly dropped its façade to show a soft underbelly.

Novelist Paul Auster praised the project. Susan Sontag said she read every line of every portrait and wept every morning.

The Times received thousands of letters, e-mails and phone calls from grateful readers. "In my 23 years on the Times, I know of nothing that has stirred the kind of public response that these portraits have," Times executive editor Howell Raines said last fall. "This is the purest example of good journalism also providing a kind of glue to a community, if you will, and perhaps also to a nation."

Adds Mr. Landman, "People normally are moved to write to a newspaper when they're angry about something. These were people writing to us in the language of gratitude and comparing the reading of these to religious supplications. I'm not used to this."

Not everyone was a fan. The essayist Thomas Mallon attacked the project for its urge to sanitize the victims' lives and iron out their quirky complexities. "Portraits of Grief operated according to their own quickly developed set of tropes, substituting, in most cases, treacle for essence. Day after day, a dozen personalities were obliterated with the Grief team's pastels," he groused in The American Scholar. "The Times has repopulated ground zero with the citizens of Pleasantville, and the `newspaper of record' has been patting itself on the back for constructing the world's largest sympathy card . . .

Some of the reporters held back on purpose, recognizing what might happen if they included too many details. Jan Hoffman wrote a portrait of a man who cheated prodigiously on his ex-wife and girlfriend, but didn't mention his indiscretions. "I did not portray him as a man who was a saint. I used one or two sort of frisky adjectives," Ms. Hoffman says.

Even so, the man's ex-wife and girlfriend "were just so upset that I had even suggested that he was lively.

"I betrayed no confidences. I was very scrupulous about that. But, I think, they knew his story and they read into what I wrote, and it's their own grief and guilt and mixed feelings about that, that they projected onto it.

"I had to go to sleep knowing that what I wrote in the paper was going to be read by somebody's child in 15 years."

Ms. Scott was scolded by the relatives of two people she profiled. One family expected more of a traditional obituary, one that summarized the victim's professional accomplishments. In the other case, a widow was upset because she had hoped the portrait would focus on her husband's virtues.

"It was just unbelievably upsetting," Ms. Scott recalls. "You've tried to do this thing at this horrible moment for them, and you've actually inflicted more pain inadvertently."

On the whole, however, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. The writers are visibly humbled. Ms. Hoffman says she just received two more voice mails from people who called to thank her. "They say, `I can never thank you enough, this is so meaningful to us' - and that makes me feel so embarrassed. I just feel, `Aww shucks, oh please, all I did was write down what you told me in 200 words. I feel so terrible that something so slight is so meaningful to you. I wish I could do more, I really wish I could do more, this is such a tiny thing I did.' "

Though a year has passed, calling families isn't necessarily easier than it was in those early days. "Most of them are past the first shock of grief, so you're unfortunately reaching through the cotton that they've wrapped around themselves, or you're trying, however awkwardly, to pick apart a little scab that's started to form," Ms. Hoffman says. "You try to do it as delicately as you can and as graciously as you can, but it's still awful."

Many people are reading the portraits now at a special section on the Times Web site www.nytimes.com/pages/national/portraits , where visitors can sign a virtual guest book and offer condolences. Some close relatives of the dead are using the site to write to the victims, trying to exorcise their grief by exhibiting it.

Why do people keep reading them? "I know people began to get Portrait fatigue. People would tell me, `I can't read any more.' Then they say they'll read just one, and before they know it they find they've read all of them," Glenn Collins says. "It's our Vietnam Wall."

Last fall, as Ms. Scott was trying to understand their appeal, an old family friend told her that the project was "all about love."

"These were not searing profiles that necessarily caught all the dimensions of the person and their foibles," she admits. "Sometimes they erred too far in the opposite direction, but what came out of them was the love of the people who spoke to us, for those people. And I do think that has a sort of immortal power beyond the, perhaps, more ephemeral details of what happened in that moment on that day in that year."

Ms. Scott and others say they have tried to learn from their experience of working on the project, of listening to those expressions of love. Ms. Hoffman says she is more grateful now for what she has in her life. "You know, to sit in a local deli and have a tuna fish sandwich with my daughter, and realize some people can't do that now . . ." She trails off and becomes quiet. "Those kinds of moments, I taste them more deeply now."

At the post-Second World War Potsdam Conference in 1945, Joseph Stalin is reported to have told Winston Churchill, "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." Portraits of Grief helped save the victims from becoming mere statistics.

Yet one number is especially impressive. When the project began, the newspaper's staff said they wanted to profile every victim whose family agreed. Last Sunday, the paper ran 14 more portraits. So far, they're up to 2,219.