Sorrow on the loose in New York

There was a service at St Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue last night to honour the British nationals who died on 11 September. There is no need to specify the year. Any mention of 11 September will be

The choir were heavenly, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, read a stirring message from the Queen - "Grief is the price we pay for love" - but then the Archbishop of Canterbury, dedicating a monument to the dead, read out only the name of the American - "a lover of Britain" - whose family had paid for the statue. No one thought to identify the 67 men and women who must also have loved Britain, being her children, and who will never see their home again.

And then we spilled out of the cool of the church into the feverish hustle of the street only to see one of the most extraordinary sights in this city of surreal spectacle - 340 British bobbies in their helmets standing on the pavement, flown in from across Britain to carry the flag and pay their respects.

There was something so solid and cheering and familiar about them that it made you want to cry. Sorrow is on the loose in this city now and it can ambush you at any time.

In Remember, Reflect, Renew, a 10-page guide to events surrounding the anniversary of 9.11, the New York Times lists more than 700 ways in which those presently alive in this city can commemorate that terrible day.

Some may prefer to avoid The Silent Project where "visitors will enter a silent room and listen on headphones to some of New York's top DJs" and the more British among us will probably draw the line at the Wiping Away Tears Ceremony performed by American Indian artists converging from four corners, although already I sense that today will be hard to get through without Kleenex.

The number of 11 September events constitutes an act of defiance in itself. Only in New York would outrageous loss be a cue for such crazy abundance. From the city where the average takeout menu is as heavy as a Gutenberg Bible comes an astounding choice of commemorative possibilities: grief-to-go.

You want Zen memorial shadow dancing? A Peace and Human Security Festival? Concerts, prayers, installations, dimming of Broadway bulbs, mass lighting of candles? Miles of video footage that documents the "resilience, strength and generosity of New Yorkers"?

The Historical Society has a seminar on the forensic science of recovery - the efforts to find and identify fragments of the thousands of men and women pulverised in the collapse of the Twin Towers. Over at the Staten Island Botanical Garden, surviving members of the Fire Department's Engine Company 136 will start a Garden Of Healing at 11am with a symbolic seedling from the only tree to survive at Ground Zero.

And then there are the quilts. Hundreds of quilts. At the American Folk Museum is The National Tribute Quilt created by "some 1,000 participating quilters".

Down the street, a beautiful, coloured patchwork made by children from the Sacramento League of Associated Muslims, brings the message that there is "unity in diversity". Precisely the opposite of the message delivered by a league of disassociated Muslims a year ago this morning out of a bright blue sky.

11 September, 2001 was one of those glittering New York days that simultaneously hurt your heart and make you glad to be alive, and the weather this week has been a cruel echo of it.

Only in the past 24 hours has it grown intolerably humid, the air thickening with thoughts of thunder or worse. "People are not especially frightened that there will be another terrorist attack but this anniversary arrives with such a freight of sadness, " says one New York editor.

"For months after 9/11 you felt as though you had no skin. I took my son to a ball game and it was a beautiful day and I looked at the George Washington bridge and everything seemed impossibly fragile.

"Everything and anything could fall down. We've only just started to forget those feelings, but given the amount of media coverage, not to remember is impossible."

He's right. Three days ago, my daughter brought home a note from school advising parents to switch off their TVs: "As the anniversary approaches, the coverage in the media is extensive if not relentless.

"Young children may be confused and frightened by repeated telecasts which may leave them bewildered."

And frightened and bewildered is simply not this town's style. It's a can-do, no-problems kind of place where every kink in the human condition can be ironed out. But what do you do about human nature so crooked it commits suicide and mass murder on breakfast television? "It's new to them," explains Serge, a Frenchman who has lived in Manhattan for nine years.

"For London, for Paris, tragedy, suffering, it's usual. Here in New York..." he gives a helpless oldworld shrug, "... they don't know what to do, but they have to do something. Doing something is what they do. They're Americans."

Like an adolescent who's been in a road crash, New York is reluctant to rest the injury, impatient to get better and back on the road. You see it in the constant, almost hysterical emphasis on Strength and Recovery and Healing. You hear it in the voices of TV interviewers probing the relatives of victims for signs that they have "turned the corner".

But the widows and widowers won't play along; sudden, obscene grief has robbed them not just of beloved partners, but of native optimism. "I can't honestly imagine a time when the thought of what happened won't give me pain," says Stacey Staub, a fireman's widow.

"My feeling is the anniversary is for other people than me. For me every day is 11 September. I don't need an anniversary to help me remember."

Stacey sits her daughter, Juliet, in front of a video every day that contains precious footage of her parents dancing at their wedding. Juliet is one of the hundred babies born since 9.11 who will never know their fathers.

Such statistics, witness to private devastation, sit alongside public displays of confidence like the one at the Police Museum called "Stronger Than Ever: NYPD responds to 9.11".

And yet one cop I spoke to in Times Square admitted he doesn't sleep that well any more. Nobody he knows does.

The children have been hit hardest with nightmares that even surface in the day.

An eight-year-old son of a friend of mine was walking past the Trump Tower the other afternoon when he made his mother pause to look up. "If that building fell down, Mom, would it hit our apartment?"

So, if we look at the list of New York's commemorative events today and are tempted to describe them as excessive, self-indulgent or mawkish, we would do well to remember that only 12 months ago the world fell in here. The deeper the devastation the wider the response, the search to re-establish order stretches across the quilt of the city.

Even Chanel on Fifth Avenue has a memorial placard showing tasteful stars against a denim sky.

I spotted two well-heeled girls standing solemnly at the window, sharing a moment of reflection. "It's tragic," said one.

" Yeah," agreed her friend, "Denim's so last year."

In New York, it will be so last year for many years to come.