He still wears his wedding ring, and the dried flowers she arranged on the kitchen table remain exactly as she left them.

      Her dresses still hang in the closet, and her bicycle stands next to his in the spare room, her helmet clipped to the handlebar as if she might be back soon to take another ride.

      That will never be, of course. But Michael James is not yet ready to move on from losing his wife Gricelda in the attack on the World Trade Center.

      That's why her perfume still sits on her dresser and her clothes in the drawers, and her toothbrush waits for her in the bathroom. This modest bungalow on a quiet, curving street in Willingsboro, a New Jersey suburb two hours south of New York, has become a museum of his life with Gricelda.

      "If I got rid of everything, it would help me forget her," Mr. James acknowledges. But he doesn't want to forget. He remembers the day they bought the place together in 1999, the room they wanted to add, the color they planned to paint the kitchen, where they would display their wedding pictures.

      Mr. James is 47 years old, but has always looked younger than his age. He worked as a gym teacher, and in his off hours, he lifted weights, ran and played soccer. But over the past six months, the habits of a lifetime gradually unraveled. He has quit his job and gained 20 pounds.

      "With Gricelda I felt safe. I knew she would take care of things, and that everything would be okay," Mr. James says. "I admired her. . . . I told my friends, 'I found gold.'"

      And he never worried about losing her. "That never once crossed my mind. I could just never picture her being out of my life."

      Gricelda also worked as an administrative assistant on the 79th floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower. Mr. James says that when he took her to the commuter train station on the morning of Sept. 11, she gave him a look he had never seen before. And then she was gone.

      Shortly after the first plane hit, she called him from her office, crying. He told her to hang on, that he would drive straight to the city to pick her up. Before she hung up, she said, "I love you." He told her, for the last time, that he loved her too.

      He made his way into the city, where he found himself in chaos. Smoke and flames filled the sky and emergency vehicles raced through the streets. Thousands of people were on searches like his. All day, Mr. James walked the streets of Manhattan, shouldering through the crowds, driven by the idea of finding Gricelda.

      Day after day, he retained his composure, his emotions held back by the need to complete his mission. He put up posters with her picture, and asked anyone who would listen whether they had seen her. He kept thinking that she was trying to find her way home, and he worried that she might be cold or hungry. He carried a bag that he had packed with some of her clothes, her toothbrush and her favorite shampoo, so she could have them when he found her. He felt his hope was an armor that protected them both.

      Then, at the end of the first week, his hope vanished. "All of a sudden, I just knew," he says. "I knew she was gone, and that I'd never hold her or make breakfast for her again."

      He still cries every day. He never knows what will trigger it. Almost every time he watches a movie, he breaks down during any emotional scene — "now I know how they feel," he says.

      The payout from Gricelda's life insurance wiped out the mortgage and the bills, but Mr. James's newfound financial freedom is meaningless to him.

      After teaching at the same school in Brooklyn for years, he had switched to one nearer his house just three weeks before the attacks. He returned to work on Nov. 12, but was unable to cope. He asked for a leave.

      In January, he quit, realizing that he is emotionally incapable of being the kind of teacher he wants to be right now: "With kids, you have to be 100 per cent, and I can't be."

      "I don't really know who to be angry at. If someone stabs your wife to death, you can go to court and see who did it. You see him. With this, there's no one."

      "I keep thinking about all the people who died. There has to be reason. I need some answers. My wife was an innocent. I need to know why she was taken away."

      "If you start focusing on that, you'll be angry. You'll want to pick up a weapon and kill those people. I can't get into that. I have to focus on moving on. I focus on Gricelda. I will never forget Gricelda, because she showed me love."

      No trace of Gricelda has ever been found. Mr. James has accepted that he will probably never know exactly what happened to her. Instead, he has devoted himself to his grief.

      Still, he knows that some day his mourning period will have to end. He will take Gricelda's clothes out of the dressers, sell her bicycle and move on. He just doesn't know when.

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