Rachel Uchitel Survived 9/11 -- Can She Survive Tiger?

I haven't exactly ignored the barrage of stories about Tiger Woods and his fall from grace, but I haven't been too interested, either. "Powerful Man Cheats Many Times." What else is new?

I've been more intrigued by Rachel Uchitel, Woods' voluptuous alleged mistress #1, who has been portrayed, depending on the tabloid or celebrity magazine you read, as a New York party girl, VIP hostess and gold digger.

But Uchitel is also a surviving victim of 9/11, one of the scores of people who lost a loved one in that tragedy. I talked to many of them as a reporter for the New York Times in the days, weeks and months after the destruction of the towers as they hoped against hope that their loved ones were just missing -- Perhaps lying unconscious in a hospital? Or maybe lost on some street with amnesia? -- Not dead. Their desperation and pain were documented in "Portraits of Grief," the mini-profiles of the missing and dead published by the Times in an attempt to acknowledge each life that was lost.

As part of the team devoted to writing the profiles, I wrote so many that I lost count.

So when the New York Post's front-page coverage of Tiger Woods included pictures of Uchitel's tearful face, holding up a picture of her then-fiancee and 9/11 victim James O'Grady, I rushed to look up his "portrait."

"James Andrew O'Grady kept his shirts arranged by color."

"He won a swimming scholarship to U.C.L.A."

" 'He liked things the way he liked them,' said Rachel Uchitel, Mr. O'Grady's girlfriend, and since Aug. 5, his fianceé."

Nothing rang a bell. Since the portraits came without bylines, I can't be sure I wrote that particular one. But what I know is how deeply transformed anyone who lost a loved one that day was. I have a friend who lost her mother and another who lost his brother and, while both have struggled emotionally through the years, they are doing well. But, I've always wondered, how did the lives of so many others turn out? How is the mother, pregnant when she lost her spouse, doing with the child who never knew his father? Whatever happened to the 24-year-old husband who made it out of the burning towers alive while his young wife perished in the inferno? How are the grandmothers, the brothers, the friends, so inconsolable back then?

Now, thanks to Tiger Woods, I know that Uchitel suffered a breakdown, recovered, was married briefly and somehow has found her way to the pages of the National Enquirer as a headliner in the sordid story of the moment. For all I know she may very well be some kind of "party girl" or at least guilty of questionable judgment. But this woman knows more than a lot of us about loss, and her life so far seems a series of collisions more than a journey.

What a shame to see her back in the media glare this way. How sad Tiger Woods is what she has to survive now.