TALLMANSVILLE, W.Va. -- The infamous mine here that claimed 12 men three years ago next month will be sealed forever in early 2009 because the company that runs it says the operation is no longer economically viable.

But for the families of the workers who died Jan. 2, 2006 in the Sago Deep Mine, there is no corresponding emotional "closure."

Grief, they know, doesn't work that way.

Is this the final chapter on Sago?

"No," said Helen Winans, 78, who lost her son, Marshall Winans, 50. "It will never be closed. They [the company] may close the mine to get it out of their hair, but the mothers will never forget."

In 1982, she lost another son, Robert, in a gas rig accident just a mile from Sago. He was 32.

"People who haven't lost anybody don't understand," she said. "Ask mothers."

Wolf Run Mining Co., the International Coal Group subsidiary that owns Sago, announced the official shutdown on Dec. 12, but the troubled mine has actually been idle since March 2007.

The only people to go inside for the last 21 months have been three Wolf Run employees maintaining the place and some state contractors trying to figure out if lightning caused the methane blast that led to the miners' deaths.

Their final report, which is due next spring, is expected to bolster previous findings that lightning was to blame.

The families of the miners aren't particularly emotional about the closing. It's symbolic, maybe, but not especially significant.

"I don't think we'll ever have a closed chapter. Us families, with my brother being killed down there, you're always thinking about the day it happened," said Judy Shackleford, 67. Her brother was Terry Helms, 50.

The bodies of the miners were all recovered and buried elsewhere, not sealed inside for eternity as were the nine miners in Crandall Canyon, Utah, the site of the last major mine collapse, last year.

That place is a tomb.

Sago is different.

Families pay their respects at a memorial near the Sago Baptist Church across from the mine entrance, where Mrs. Shackleford and other family members place flowers every Christmas.

"Of course, right now it's a bad time," she said.

But the mouth of the mine itself is a forlorn gash in a mountainside, surrounded by a chain link fence and "no trespassing" signs that most of the families feel is best left alone.

"I understand that it might be a sanctuary for some people, but I think safety has to come first," said Amber Helms, 25, daughter of Terry Helms. "I don't want anyone else going down into that mine. I don't want kids going in there to play. I think enough lives have been lost in there."

The families, almost all of whom brought wrongful death suits against the coal company, remain angry that the mine stayed open at all after the accident and are glad it's finally closing.

"It's about time!" yelled 13-year-old Thomas Isaac "Ti" Anderson when he overheard his mother, Lynda Anderson, talking about the mine shutdown.

His father and her husband, Tom Anderson, died at Sago. He was 39.

"I think it should have been closed right away," said Lynda Anderson. "They had friends that had to, in my understanding, work right near that section where it happened. I think it would have been fairer to their friends not to have to do that."

International Coal Group continued to operate the mine for more than a year after the accident, but the cost of extracting what coal remains is no longer worth keeping it open.

"The burden of ongoing maintenance costs, and the substantial expenditures required to restore mine infrastructure and allow restart of production, significantly exceed the value of the remaining coal in the current market," the company said.

The accident captivated the nation for two days when a methane gas explosion ripped through the mine just as two 13-man crews began work early on that January morning.

One man died in the blast. One of the crews made it out, but the other was trapped for 41 hours before succumbing to carbon monoxide. Randal McCloy Jr. was the sole survivor and has a special place on the memorial.

A heartbreaking communication failure compounded the tragedy. An initial report indicated that all the miners were alive when in fact only Mr. McCloy had survived.

The accident, the worst in West Virginia since 1968, and two other disasters have led to changes in federal and state safety rules that are still being applied in mines across the country.

Mining companies now have to install stronger seals in abandoned sections of mines where methane accumulates.

At Sago, the Omega Block seals in an abandoned part of the mine farthest under the mountain failed to contain the methane explosion.

Companies also are now required to store extra emergency air and other supplies inside mines. At Sago, several of the miners' air packs failed.

Those changes aside, no one knows why the methane at Sago ignited in the first place. West Virginia and federal investigators have concluded that lightning set off the explosion, as did a report by a special adviser to the governor.

Although Sago was a non-union mine, the United Mine Workers weighed in with their own report rejecting the lightning theory.

The coal company lambasted the union for "political grandstanding" and said its report was "wholly unreliable as an investigatory finding."

Lightning has been found as the cause or the suspected cause of methane blasts in other mines, but in those cases there was a conduit into the mine to carry the current.

At Sago, state and federal investigators say, a lightning strike sent a pulse through the ground, which created a spark on a pump cable left behind in the sealed part of the mine where the methane had accumulated.

Researchers working for the state have been conducting experiments to test that idea further. Their findings, a supplement to the state's initial report, will be released to the families in January.

The final report will be made public in the spring, regulators said.

The families didn't believe the lightning theory before and still don't.

"I sat in those hearings and I just don't think lightning could have caused that," said Lynda Anderson. "I tend to think more that it was the force of the thunder that jarred something loose in there."

John Helms, brother of Terry and also a coal miner, agreed but said there's no way to prove anything.

"To my mind they don't know what caused it and I don't think they ever will," he said. "It's time to shut it down. Close it up and seal it."

His own time in the mines is also drawing to an end. At 62, he's retiring this week.

"I've spent 39 years in the mines," he said. "I've had enough."