The children left behind

By Helen O’neill

Associated Press

PELHAM, N.Y. — How do you tell the Shea children in Pelham that their father is in heaven when they have just witnessed hell?

How do you comfort the child who sees repeated reminders of his father’s death on television, on magazine covers, on the front pages of every newspaper?

The scenes in New York are heartbreaking: children carrying fire helmets, or playing flute at a father’s funeral, or delivering a eulogy when they are still too young to really know what the word means.

The scope is staggering.

"It’s so much harder than my own grief," said Nancy Shea of Pelham, whose husband Joseph, went to work in the Trade Center and never returned. "I don’t know how to lead them out of this. What do you say to a 10-year-old girl who lost her daddy, her uncle and her baby-sitter?"

Every child in Pelham seems to be aching for someone. Magnify that by thousands of other broken young hearts, and families, in New York and Washington and their suburbs.

Pelham is a pretty little town of 12,000 people that prides itself on being the first true suburb outside New York City. It borders the Bronx, 20 miles from the World Trade Center where nine residents were lost. That is more than the town lost in the Korean War or in Vietnam.

Lisa Hord, another of Pelham’s new widows, says, yes, she will need a lot of help. But it’s just too soon to think of future bills when her three young children are only beginning to grasp that their daddy is dead.

The day after the attack, Hord gathered her children, a 7-year-old daughter and 6-year-old twins. She explained that their father, a broker with Cantor Fitzgerald, was one of about 700 people missing from his firm.

Maybe they got the numbers wrong, her 7-year-old suggested hopefully. Maybe it was only 699. Then she asked about ballet class.

Hord has shielded her children from the pictures and from television. But she can’t help but wonder: Will they forever be branded as the children of the Trade Center terror?

"It’s not history to them," she said. "It’s their lives."

In Pelham and neighboring towns, the numbers of people flocking to memorial services and funerals is so great, they have to be scheduled around each other.

For many children it is their first funeral. And it has totally altered their perception of death.

One Pelham teen told her friends how devastated she was when her grandmother died a week before the terrorist attack. Now she feels lucky.

"At least she died a normal death," she said. "At least there was a coffin and a funeral and a body."

She was speaking at a forum at Pelham Memorial High School, held to help students deal with the tragedy. None of the children who lost parents came. But their friends were there, struggling with their own grief, and with questions about how to console their peers.

One 15-year-old described sitting with her best friend, son of a firefighter, watching the images on television, waiting for the call to say his dad was safe.

"What can I say to him?" she said, voice filled with anguish. "What can I do, when all he wants is to go to Ground Zero and dig through the rubble and find his dad?"

Another girl pulled out a picture of Amy O’Doherty, who graduated from the school in 1996.

"Amy was my neighbor, she was my role model," the girl, her voice trailing. "She was just the best in the world."

One 14-year-old announced that he couldn’t wait for snow. Because if he was throwing snowballs at his friends, time would have passed. It would be a new season. He wouldn’t be thinking of death all the time.

And snow covers everything.