Anyone who has ever struggled through a tragedy or an overwhelming loss knows there are little points of light that come from it.

A wife who loses a husband gains a sense of independence she never had. A person who loses his home in a fire makes a friend for life in the neighbor he did not know before, but who offered help beyond measure.

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As human beings, we hold on to these things for dear life. Without them, loss would just be loss. Grief would be sadness without end.

Shannon Kincaid, a neighborhood artist, knows this.

Almost two years ago, Kincaid worked in her home studio with the television on in the background. Though she never watched it, listening to the TV was a habit she had become used to while painting.

This was in the days following  the events of Sept. 11, and a program was on telling the stories of victims, survivors and rescue workers.

“There was a fireman talking about having been there on the pile,” Kincaid says. “He said, ‘Everything around me was just annihilation, dust, ash. There was no form, no substance — you could see just rubble. I looked down and at my feet was this Raggedy Ann doll. She was burned, but she was intact. I bent down to pick her up because I thought: Geez, this must have belonged to one of those little girls on one of those flights. And the thought occurred to me this is all that’s left of her.’

“Until that moment, I was just numb,” Kincaid continues. “I didn’t know how to feel or how to think. I was having the hardest time processing this image [of Ground Zero] and the feelings of people hating us so much that they could do this. And, when he put it into those terms — because I have a little girl — they were very simple terms that I could comprehend. And I thought: ‘I have to convey what he said. I’ve got to put that in a painting.’”

Kincaid has been painting her entire life. She knew from kindergarten, when she was happiest with a fistful of crayons, that she wanted to be an artist, she says. But wanting to make a living of her work, she has often painted for others.

“I’ve worked mostly in oils for commission, especially portraits and things for people’s homes,” she says. “For many years, I worked for Baylor hospital, and I’ve done a lot of watercolors for them.”

But this painting was to be different. It would be her therapy, her way of getting through the confusion and emotion that nearly all Americans were feeling at that time.

“To paint a thing is easy, but to convey a feeling or an emotion is so much harder,” she says. “I wanted to be a part of that bucket brigade and help. But logistically, I couldn’t do that.”

So Kincaid snapped into action. She visited a local fire station and had a fireman pose for her with a doll to represent Raggedy Ann. She hadn’t seen the fireman’s face on TV, she says, and was glad of that.

“I still don’t know what he looked like. I didn’t want to portray him.”

She didn’t know anyone with a Raggedy Ann doll, but wanted to portray the figure accurately, so she started doing some research.

“I finally went to fabric store and looked in some pattern books and, sure enough, there was a pattern of Raggedy Ann,” she says. “She had on a blue calico dress and a white pinafore, and of course her hair is bright red.”

As Kincaid thought about it, something remarkable occurred to her.

“She was wearing red, white and blue,” she says. “Her creator fashioned a patriot and didn’t even know it.”

Inspired by that, she says she painted the doll “face up, with her indomitable smile showing through the char and the burn.”

“I just thought: What a symbol of our country that little Raggedy Ann doll is. What a fitting image for us. We’ve been bloodied and battered, but we are not beaten.”

The act of painting the fireman and the doll had so inspired and soothed her that she decided to paint another piece of a policeman. She had an officer at the Northeast Substation pose for her with his K-9 unit German shepherd “because they’re heroes too,” Kincaid says, referring to police dogs.

The second painting was meant to be hung next to the first and, when viewed together, the officer and dog are looking down at the fireman picking up the doll. Kincaid, who wanted the pieces “to be as life size as possible,” painted them 6-foot-6 by 3 feet.

Put together, she says, “ their verticality suggests twin towers,” so she named them “The New Twin Towers.”

The paintings now hang in a restaurant called Nino’s, 18 blocks from Ground Zero in New York City . The owner of the restaurant, Antonio Nino Vendome, closed his doors on Sept. 12, 2001, and began offering meals and respite to the firefighters, police officers, soldiers, Red Cross workers and anyone else working at the World Trade Center site.

In the five months the restaurant stayed closed, Vendome served more than 500,000 meals, including sending about 500 meals daily to the WTC site, and spent hundreds of thousands of his own money.

The daughter of a friend of Kincaid’s, who was living in the city, hooked Kincaid up with Nino. He had heard about the paintings and decided he wanted them included in the many 9-11-related works he had collected and put on display in his restaurant in an exhibit called “A Celebration of Life.”

“I think it is very important to capture this, so future generations can look back and say, ‘This is what happened, this is how people felt,’” Vendome says.

After speaking with him, Kincaid donated the pieces to the exhibit.

“I didn’t want to benefit financially from them,” Kincaid says now. “They were my reaction to that horrible thing and my gift, so to speak.

“It didn’t matter to me really where they wound up, as long as they found a home in New York somewhere. That’s where they belong.”