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Sun. Sep 12, 2004

The Children of 9-11

A year ago I wrote, “Perhaps most of all, I’ll think about the children who lost a parent that day. Of all the horrid after effects of that day, I think that one haunts me most. Some were in their mother’s womb, and will never know their father. Many were too young to grasp what happened, but maybe now, two years on, they do. All of them will grow to maturity with an ever developing perception of that loss.”

Celia and Zaya are children of 9/11.

Three years ago, their father, 38-year-old bond trader Calvin Gooding, perished when a plane hit his office on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower, where he was a partner at Cantor Fitzgerald. At the time, LaChanze was 8 1/2 months pregnant with Zaya.

After her sister-in-law called to tell her the building had been struck, LaChanze remembers turning on the TV and “counting the windows down the tower to see if it was his floor, and his floor was right in the middle of where the smoke was.”

Once the skyscraper collapsed, she stood on her balcony and shrieked so loudly that her neighbors came rushing to her side. “I was on my knees,” she says. “They were all trying to help me.”

As the third anniversary of the catastrophic attack is observed today, the young widow seems to have shed her anguish and anger through a combination of faith, hard work and devotion to her children.

LaChanze tells Celia, who is just beginning to comprehend her father’s death, that “her daddy is up in heaven and he is watching over her and that she can talk to him as much as she wants. But he can’t talk back, because he’s no longer in a body. He’s a spirit.” “She’s just an extraordinary mom,” said “Color Purple” director Gary Griffin, “and I think that’s all part of the spirit that makes her a great artist.”

AJC: “Children, art let widow remake life”

There are about 3,000 children of 9-11, and some of this nation’s leading trauma experts are trying to study and help them. The New York Times has a lengthy article about what they’ve learned, along with some painful “anecdotal evidence.”

The bone brought sad finality to everyone but Brendan Fitzpatrick.

It was proof that his father had died on Sept. 11, 2001. But for Brendan, who is 5, the news that a piece of Thomas Fitzpatrick’s humerus had been recovered was vexing, at best. “Can we get all the pieces and put them together?” he recently asked his mother at their home in Tuckahoe, N.Y. “So he could be alive.”

In Harlem, a different puzzle unfolded for Samuel Fields. He was 10 when the towers collapsed, and knew his father was gone. But he could not cry. He jumped off the steep rocks in Central Park, punched a classmate and, the following summer, wound up in jail for pelting cars with stones. It was only then, after his mother yelled, “Would your father want this?” that the first tears fell.

Brendan Fitzpatrick and Samuel Fields belong to the vast tribe of young children who lost parents on Sept. 11 – an estimated 3,000 boys and girls who are all working through their own painful puzzles of bewilderment and sorrow.

Marianne Fitzpatrick knew her children would ask many questions, and no matter how hard it is to answer them, she always tries. One recent summer day, it was she who began the conversation that is now a central theme of their lives.

“Where is Daddy?”

“Daddy’s in heaven,” answered 3-year-old Caralyn, her blue eyes watching for an approving nod.

“How do you get to heaven?”

“Somebody kills you,” answered Brendan.

Perhaps the most trying thing about watching children grieve is that it happens incrementally: they grieve as they grow. Every few years, children reprocess the death of a parent in ways that match their newfound stage of cognitive development. This reprocessing becomes especially arduous for the Sept. 11 children.

NY Times: “Growing Up Grieving, With Constant Reminders of 9/11”

Reprocessing grief. But how can a child ever understand things that totally befuddle the adults around them? They are the least prepared among us, yet the most affected.