All this week we have heard and read the stories of those who died in the airplanes that crashed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. As the names of the victims in the towers come to be known, we should hear their stories as well. Not because we will remember them (and we shouldn't even try), but because the mere act of hearing each of these stories helps to connect those of us in the rest of the nation to those personally affected by the tragedy. It is through such a collective experience that all of us will come to understand the magnitude of what was lost on September 11, 2001.

In this day and age, it is hard to believe that there are people who can slide through the cracks of the information age. People who aren't in any government computer files, whose presence at the World Trade Center could never be documented. But rest assured, they are lying in the rubble alongside the lawyers, stockbrokers, secretaries, programmers, clerks and others.

I'd like to tell three stories of people who will never be identified as victims of the attack on the World Trade Center.

Pablo Garcia was born in Monterrey, Mexico. He is the most likely of the three to be remembered as a victim. He lived in Newark, N.J., along with a number of other men in a squalid apartment. Every morning at five he walked down to a day laborer pickup spot. On Tuesday, a van pulled up, asking for men with experience putting up sheet rock. He raised his hand, accepted the offer of $10 an hour--no overtime bonus--and jumped in. Once at the WTC, the man--who was trying to renovate a floor of 1 World Trade Center on the cheap, with non-union workers--put them to work placing and nailing and taping and spackling. When the orders came to evacuate, the English-speaking foreman left the floor. By the time Garcia and his fellow illegal immigrants figured out what was going on, it was too late. They died in the stairwells as the building came down on top of them. Garcia leaves his wife, Anita, and five children, who reside in a nice house outside Monterrey. Every week he sent home as much money as he could, keeping his family in a solidly middle-class style. Chances are some of his flatmates in Newark--who also stood in wait at the labor pool--saw him get in the van and, after learning of the tragedy and not seeing him come back in the afternoon, put two and two together. One of them probably called his home in Monterrey to relate the news. Pablo Garcia will be mourned, if not by the powers that be in this country.

Ricky Jones has already been mourned. His parents kicked him out of their house in Queens a year ago after they discovered him smoking heroin. They wrote him off then, striking his life from their memory. In order to make enough money to buy more skag, he started turning tricks on the streets, sometimes just off Times Square (in the corners where Giuliani's "quality of life" cops weren't looking), sometimes down in the financial district. Tuesday morning found him in a bathroom off the underground shopping center beneath the WTC towers. He'd just made twenty bucks and had almost enough to make his midday score. He was starting to jones a bit and didn't recognize the fear and speed with which people were pouring out of the stores and hallways. He needed just one more trick, ten or twenty bucks, but no one would stop. Everyone kept rushing past. When 2 World Trade Center fell, he was directly beneath it, still trying to cadge enough cash for a hit.

No one will remember her as Estelle Wilson. They called her "Mama Mia" and "The Godmother." She would dispense advice in a terrible Italian accent to anyone who gave her some money. "Itsa gonna bea good daya ona da market" was one of her favorite sayings. Some superstitious brokers hit her up every morning on their way in to work. Hearing her catchphrase always put them in a good mood. For twenty-five years, Wilson lived in the Bronx with an abusive husband. She walked out on him, but never found a job that stuck with her. Two years after leaving her home, she ended up homeless. Most days, she earned enough with her Italian shtick to get good food to eat. She never saved money, because she was bound to lose it in the night. On Tuesday, she was walking around the financial district, dispensing her usual advice. At about eight-thirty, the early morning rush dying out as the markets prepared to open, she ambled over to the WTC to get some food in the food court. In the mass of confusion, she never got out before the building came down on her, too.

Dozens of people just like Pablo, Ricky and Estelle died on Tuesday in the attack. Their names will never be on any list. Not one news agency will tell their stories. Yet these unknowns lost their lives, the most precious thing any of us can own, just as certainly as those better-known.

In the end, we are all carbon-based oxygen-breathing life forms. Nothing more, and nothing less. As Tuesday's attack proves once again, the gift of life is immeasurably precious, even if the cost of taking a life is immorally cheap.

Jon Worley remembers the view from the World Trade Center observation deck. He took pictures with a Kodak disk camera back in 1984. He has no idea where those pictures are now.