The 9/11 children

The bone brought sad finality to everyone but Brendan Fitzpatrick. It was proof that his father had died in the 9/11 attacks. But for Brenda...

The bone brought sad finality to everyone but Brendan Fitzpatrick. It was proof that his father had died in the 9/11 attacks. But for Brendan, 5, the news that a piece of Thomas Fitzpatrick’s humerus had been recovered was vexing. ‘‘Can we get all the pieces and put them together?’’ he asked his mother. ‘‘So he could be alive?’’

In Harlem, Samuel Fields faced a different puzzle. He was 10 at the time, and knew his father was gone. But he couldn’t cry. The next summer, he wound up in jail for pelting cars with stones. It was then, after his mother yelled, ‘‘Would your father want this?’’ that the tears fell.

Brendan and Samuel belong to the tribe of children who lost parents on 9/11 — an estimated 3,000 boys and girls who are facing painful puzzles of bewilderment and sorrow. From the start, there were grim forecasts for this group, commonly referred to as the ‘‘9/11 kids’’, and rumors: There would be scores of orphans, permanent trauma, a marred generation. But for all the dark assumptions and outpouring of sympathy and money, the children receded from public view, protected by their families. And psychotherapists confronted a new challenge: how to treat children who has loss has been so intimate yet spectacularly public.

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If the father who died coached soccer, his son stopped playing. School is avoided on the anniversary. TV is a minefield. Work is identified with death. Many of the surviving parents have quit their careers. But patterns have surfaced, ranging from symptoms of anxiety and depression to violent outbursts and withdrawal. Teenagers, in the age-old effort to fit in, are most prone to keeping quiet about how their parents died.

And in the most powerful and challenging experiences, the youngest kids — those who were toddlers three years ago — are now grasping the meaning of death, the fact that their fathers and mothers will not return.

But all the 9/11 kids are bound by one thing: the burden of mourning a private loss that is, at least for the country, historic in stature. Many children watched the attacks on TV. Year after year, they are confronted with a ceaseless ambush of reminders — at the movies, in classroom banter, on a poster at the supermarket. To them, these are not the images of towers falling and planes crashing, but the intimate scenes of a parent’s death. ‘‘It was seeing my dad die over and over again,’’ said Sarah Van Auken, 15, whose father, Kenneth Van Auken, died in the attacks.

The children span 14 countries, but are concentrated in New York and New Jersey. Among them are 47 pairs of twins, one set of triplets and 81 stepchildren. Their average age at the time of the attacks was 8 1/2. More than 100 of them were yet to be born when their fathers died.

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The 9/11 children have the burden of sharing their grief with millions of strangers. It is common for children to feel anger, and even jealousy toward a parent who has died. But this compendium of emotions is absent from the patriotic, one-dimensional representations of grief assigned to 9/11 victims on TV and in political speeches. What should be a personal journey is confusingly public.

‘‘These kids can’t walk from their middle school to the deli to buy a Snapple without seeing 15 references to 9/11: the signs in stores, bumper stickers,’’ said Chris Burke, founder and president of Tuesday’s Children, a nonprofit organization. ‘‘And when they’re in line to buy that Snapple, there’s the whisperers. They can’t escape it.’’ — (NYT)