Now we must prepare to bury our honored dead. Now we must conceive images to match their valor, in an event that will outlive all of us now alive. Now, as tough men gnaw at the ghastly rubble, we must decide about the manner in which we say our farewells. Our dead can't go the way of the dead of our war in Vietnam, buried in isolated pools of family grief. Our farewell must be collective, marked by restraint, dignity and stoicism.

The visions of all citizens must be welcome. But my own vision is a simple one, derived from the New York part of the funeral of Abraham Lincoln. In the dark spring of 1865, after Lincoln had been murdered in Washington, his body was taken on a journey north and then west to his home country in Illinois.

It arrived in New York on the morning of April 24, then placed on a black velvet dais in the rotunda of City Hall. By 1 p.m., it was ready for viewing by New Yorkers, and more than 500,000 lined up on Broadway to say goodbye.

The following day, the coffin was laid on a 14-foot funeral car pulled by 16 horses. Then, followed by thousands of mourners, the horses clip-clopped up Broadway, bearing their single victim of heartless fanaticism. The cortege passed through Union Square, crossed into Fifth Ave., and at 34th St., moved west to the Hudson River railroad depot, where it continued its journey home.

Heroes to Be Honored

We don't have a single victim of fanaticism; we have thousands. But we absolutely must honor — as a city — those firemen, police officers and emergency workers who died on Sept. 11 while saving human lives. A date should be chosen, a few weeks from now, when it is certain that there are absolutely no survivors.

Then, in my vision, we should assemble a symbolic horse-drawn coffin for every one of those dead New Yorkers. For obvious reasons, the coffins must be empty.

Horses, caissons, coffins could assemble at Union Square, which has become one of the great public plazas of this New York calamity. There we could share a moment of silence and reflection, facing the spontaneous altars created by the people of New York and the statue of George Washington, which faces downtown. Mayor Giuliani, of course, should preside, bringing to the moment the restraint and simplicity — so mercifully free of cheap oratory — that has marked his style since the morning of Sept. 11.

And then the single file of horse-drawn coffins should circle Union Square, east, west north, then south, beginning its journey south on Broadway, followed in silence by the people of New York. The music should be very simple: lone drummers and Celtic pipers dispersed through the line, expressing the deepest, most eloquent grief with laments that are older than recorded history.

The procession would pass bookstores and record shops and university buildings, all symbols of our civilization. It would pass food shops and clothing stores and car washes. It would pass, in SoHo and Tribeca, some buildings that have been there since the funeral of Lincoln. It would move into the frozen zone, passing the western borders of Chinatown. It would pass the photographic studio where Mathew Brady once worked, a man who photographed the living Lincoln. It would pass a block from Cooper Union, where Lincoln spoke so eloquently about slavery in 1859.

Memorial for the City

The procession would come within a block of the old Five Points, the worst slum in American history, where 19th century poverty and squalor made some men into criminals and others into newspapermen, lawyers and, yes, cops and firemen. It would pass City Hall, that symbol of our rude democracy. And then at Vesey St., it would pass St. Paul's Chapel, where Washington worshiped when serving as the first President of this wounded republic, in a time when New York was this country's capital city.

There, each horse-drawn coffin could pause, as so many did yesterday, to acknowledge the twisted steel and poisonous smoke of our ruins. Months from now, men and women will still be digging with hands and picks at that rubble. We might still see the scorched face of the Borders bookstore on Church and Vesey, and the American flag above the tallest frailest tip of the curved façade.

The ruins could be glimpsed down Dey St., too, where thousands of us once huddled to cheer the New York Yankees, down past the Photo Discount Store, the cell phone shop, Ho Yips Chinese Restaurant, down Fulton St., down Maiden Lane, down Liberty St. Down there where the New Yorkers represented by those horse-drawn coffins went to their deaths.

And then the procession would move on, clip-clopping down Broadway, through the Canyon of Heroes.

Then they could come out at the wide bright open space of the Battery, to arrange themselves in a row behind the fence that faces the harbor. That body of water through which so many of their ancestors had come on journeys of hope and liberation.

The horse-drawn coffins would face Ellis Island. And they would face an immense statue rising from another island, coppery green and neoclassical austere, holding a raised torch of welcome in one hand and a tablet in the other, bearing the date July 4, 1776. A statue made real by the contributions of French school children and the poorest New Yorkers. A monumental statue created by Bartholdi, completed by the efforts of an immigrant from Hungary, a newspaper publisher named Pulitzer.

There at the Battery, while gulls once more soared in the sky of New York, and flags curled and flapped in the salt wind, the symbolic coffins of our honored dead could receive our goodbyes. There should be no fevered rally, calling for vengeance and death. Not here. Not on this day. Someone could read from W.H. Auden, who lived his New York life on St. Marks Place. Here, from his "Memorial for the City":

We know without knowing there is reason for what we bear,
That our hurt is not a desertion, that we are to pity
Neither ourselves or our city;
Whoever the searchlights catch,
Whatever the loudspeakers blare,
We are not to despair.

No Self-Pity

We might then hear Ray Charles give us the greatest of all versions of "America the Beautiful," infused with the blues, with a grieving sorrow, with an immense love, but not an ounce of self-pity.

And then we must do what none of our honored dead can ever do again: turn away, murmur private words of prayer or thanks, head back into the injured city, and get on with our lives.