"Our September" brought to an end plans for further "Mercy Street" series paintings. The following statement was written for a flyer distributed to friends and acquaintances in early October 2001, after the painting was completed:

I made this painting during the last weeks of September, 2001. It is an expression of grief over the events of the 11th, and hopefully a balm for the wounded: the blue wounded sky, the wounded psyche of city and nation, the survivors, the witnesses, the shaken. And may it serve as a resting place for the 3,000 or more voices that flock together in the air high above the southern tip of Manhattan, far off, inaudible, but always calling to us in imagination now.

When making this painting I felt that I worked on it the way the mourners of the victims made and tended the impromptu altars one saw around town in those days after the 11th in front of firehouses, police stations, or on street corners: bit added to bit, candle upon candle, poem and prayer and photograph, flowers added to flowers, one devotion added to another, an effort to make the thoughts and feelings last, to make the light one could truly live by.

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