Times Insider A 9/11 Story That Forced Our Reporter to Make an Unusual Choice Katherine Rosman of The Times explored the relationship of a young man and his grandmother, and how they wrestled with grief in very different ways. Jeanne Maurer and her grandson Jake Campbell, with The Times reporter Katherine Rosman and her dog, Gertie. Jake’s mother — Jeanne’s daughter — was killed on Sept. 11, 2001.

When Jeanne Maurer, 85, told me last year that she was lonely after the sudden death of her dog, Zak, I could hardly bear it. I showed up on her doorstep a few weeks later, Zabar’s bag in one hand and my dog’s leash in the other. Over chicken salad on pumpernickel, we sat at her dining room table for hours, talking about her life before and after her daughter Jill Maurer Campbell was killed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Jeanne had always tried to hold in her emotions. But when Zak died, “I couldn’t stop crying for weeks,” she told me. It came flowing out of her, “all that grief.” For years, I had known Jill’s son, Jake Campbell, whom Jeanne had raised with her husband, Joseph, after their daughter was killed at 31. (A fire department captain, Joe died of a cancer linked to 9/11 toxins, in 2014.) I met Jake, 25, in 2018, reaching out to him on Facebook after reading a heart-rending article about him in The Wall Street Journal.

We became friends and grew particularly close in the last several years. His Grandma Jeanne is a warm, doting woman who won’t let you help clear the dishes. “Fuhgeddaboutit,” she will say when you try. I bonded with her last year when Jake invited me to join them at the annual ceremony to commemorate the attack on the World Trade Center.

As they walked near one of the reflecting pools, I noticed Jake take his grandmother’s hand in a gesture of protection and affection. In my imagination, I could envision the scene in years past. Jake as a little boy and Jeanne, his avuncular and loving grandmother, clasping his hand.

How had the years shifted their dynamics of grief? Had they? Perhaps, I thought, I could write about Jake and Jeanne and how they had each tried in their own ways to cope with Jill’s death and the gaping absence it left in their lives. The resulting article was published last week in The Times. It is unusual, as a reporter at The Times, to write about people you have personal relationships with.

Even more, we rarely make ourselves part of our stories. In fact, my job demands that I fade into the background and observe people and circumstances from an emotional distance. Writing about Jake and Jeanne would call on me to do the opposite — to write about people I know and care for, and to insert myself into the story so readers would be well aware of my connection.

Doing so would force me to walk a complicated line as a journalist, prioritizing angles that were relevant to readers without sacrificing personal relationships that I value. But I also realized that these relationships — especially the one with Jake, which has let me watch him mature from a teenager into a man — would allow me to draw them out to discuss the intimacies of grief in a way that an arm’s-length, dispassionate reporter could not. In June, with the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 approaching, I asked Jake if he would consider letting me report a story.

He talked to his grandmother, and they agreed. Then I pitched the idea to my editors, making clear my personal relationship and the requirement that I integrate myself into the story. Let’s give it a try, they told me.

I devoted most of August to reporting this article — speaking to Jake, on video and over the phone; meeting with Jeanne in person, with my dog sitting at her feet. (“Don’t come over without Gertie,” she told me.) Despite knowing Jeanne and Jake as I do, I was unprepared for the emotional depth of the conversations. When Jake, a Catholic, expla...