Why the victim count matters

Numbers can be cold and objective, but they can also be packed with emotion and key to healing and closure.

2,752 is an example of the latter. That's the current official count of how many people died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. It went down by 40 this week.

New York Times columnist Dan Barry wrote a moving, evocative reflection on the lasting power and importance of this particular number:

The change in the number is more than a mere adjustment in a dispassionate tally. It reflects the singular horror of the trade center collapse, so thorough in its destruction that the exact number of victims remains elusive more than two years later. It reflects the worst in human nature: that many people, seeing opportunity in disaster, reported fictitious deaths in hopes of collecting benefits.

But it also reflects the best, city officials say, as personified by investigators so intent on determining the true and sacred number of the dead that they properly took their time, even if it meant that a few fraudulent names, or the names of the living, were sprinkled among those of the many dead. Better that, they reasoned, than to exclude the name of one true victim.