After working his shift at a local bakery, Moses Assanful, right, sits with his mother, Mary Assanful, during an interview at her home in New York City. Mary Assanful has not been able to work since Sept. 11, 2001, when her co-workers at Windows on the World restaurant died in the attacks on the twin towers. She is among surviving Windows workers who are now trying to establish a cooperative restaurant. Moses helps support his mother and the rest of the family. ASSOCIATED PRESS

How people coped with Sept. 11 attacks

In the days after the terrorist attacks, even people thousands of miles away seemed suddenly focused on making life more meaningful. Many changed careers, found religion, got married.

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But how much did most people's lives really change in the long term? Experts say the answers aren't black-and-white or easy to quantify.

Polls found, for instance, that attendance at religious services spiked after the attacks - but only for a short time. And though there was much speculation about a post-Sept. 11 baby boom, recently compiled figures showed that the national birth rate actually fell in 2002, when compared with 2001, furthering a downturn that began in the early 1990s.

In the end, finding evidence of a baby boom is "kind of an iffy proposition," says Brady Hamilton, a demographer for the National Center for Health Statistics, which released the birth data. "You could have just as many people decide to postpone having children as those who decide to have children."

It's not necessarily the phoenix-from-the-ashes story many people were looking for in a time when good news was scarce. But it's not surprising to experts who track the way people respond to painful events.

"We can't assume that a tragedy is going to have the same effect on all of us," says Lawrence Calhoun, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.

Calhoun has co-authored several books, including "Trauma and Transformation: Growing in the Aftermath of Suffering."

Sometimes, he says, people are able to move on and even grow because of tragedy - but others struggle. And some make post-trauma plans that eventually fall by the wayside like a New Year's resolution.

"Generally, if the event has had enough impact for a person to make a big change, it will stick. But it depends," says Melissa Calhoun Pankowski, a life and transition coach and certified grief counselor in Marin County, Calif.

Often, she says, it's a matter of how well her clients were doing before tragedy hit - and how rashly the decision was made.

"Say people were together as boyfriend and girlfriend for a while and hadn't made an official commitment. After 9-11, they might've said, 'Let's make it real,"' Pankowski says. "That could work.

"But where someone all of the sudden said, 'I want to find somebody.' Will that stick? That's debatable."

--From the Thursday, September 11, 2003 online edition of the Augusta Chronicle