THE CHILDREN
Anguish for Vast Toll of Children Left Behind
By AMY WALDMAN
September 23, 2001
From the Cantor Fitzgerald bond-trading firm alone, the estimate is staggering: 1,500. Not the number of victims.
The children they left behind.
No list of children who lost a father or mother at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, or on the four planes that terrorists took to fiery ends, has been compiled. But the number of bereft youngsters will probably stretch into the thousands.
As families finally lay hope aside like a useless weapon, accepting that those missing are gone, communities face an enormous challenge: how to comfort, and raise, all the children who lost a parent — in some cases their only parent — in an event of epic dimension.
"We've never been faced with anything of this magnitude simultaneously," said Ruth Kreitzman, a clinical social worker who counsels bereaved children for the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services, one of the country's largest nonprofit mental health agencies.
"Even people who have dealt with bereaved kids a lot are struggling to understand now how this will be interpreted by children."
Already, families are refiguring caretaking, and in some cases undertaking delicate custody negotiations. At the same time, relatives are struggling with how, and when, to explain to children that parents are no longer missing, but dead. And they are trying to teach young children what death means.
The Rev. Jim Cunningham, a Roman Catholic priest, watched Tara Stackpole tell her five children that the body of their father, Capt. Timothy Stackpole of the Fire Department, had been found. "They look at that as a gift," Father Cunningham said, "because so many people don't have that."
The task is complicated by postwar social trends — from high divorce rates to single motherhood — that had already fragmented many of the families. And it is colored by the demographics of those lost. Thousands were in their 20's, 30's or 40's, and had begun to bring a new generation into the world.
It is a generation in its infancy, with possibly thousands of children under 12. Many are so young they will have no memory of their parents, let alone how they died.
The death notices in New York newspapers hint at the scale of loss. "Loving father of Brian, Claire and Elizabeth." "Devoted father of Meryl, Kara, Alex and Jason." "Beloved father of Kevin, Kaitlyn, Brian, Brendan and Terence."
From the Fire Department to the bond-trading floor, many of the men lost came from close-knit Irish Catholic communities that have traditionally produced large families. They have left large broods fatherless. Some of the almost 350 firefighters who died had five or more children apiece. Two brothers in Westchester who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald left seven children, from 7 months to 14 years in age, between them.
As if their husbands had gone off to war, not work, vast numbers of young widows are faced with raising children alone. For some fathers left behind, it will mean learning to make school lunches or reaching for female relatives to handle a daughter's first period. And just as the attacks created thousands of single parents, they took many single mothers, leaving some children essentially orphaned.
Even seasoned grief counselors say they have no sense of how these children will cope with their loss and upended lives. While the AIDS epidemic, for example, stole thousands of parents prematurely, it took years to do it. This time, in one day, often in one neighborhood, scores of children are suddenly missing parents.
And their bodies may never be recovered. As a result, said Luis Espinoza, whose wife, Fanny, 29, has not been found, his 11-year-old son is still hoping. Christian tells his father that he is trying to concentrate in school but cannot stop thinking about the twin towers. He asks Mr. Espinoza questions like, "Why didn't those buildings have parachutes?" Or: "Why didn't you tell her to quit? She wanted to quit before."
"I said I didn't know this was going to happen," said Mr. Espinoza, a long-haul truck driver who lives in Teaneck, N.J. "Nobody knew this was going to happen."
Mr. Espinoza says his children — he also has a 9-year-old daughter — are all that keep him holding on. "Sometimes you want to commit suicide," he said. "The reason I'm not doing it is my kids."
It appears that many more men than women were lost. New widows like Minerva Mentor-Portillo are just beginning to grapple with how they will raise children alone. Mrs. Mentor-Portillo has two sons, 5 and 7, and has been working toward a graduate degree in social psychology. She is now solely responsible for everything from the family's financial future to child care.
Stay-at-home moms, meanwhile, may face going to work or selling the family home when benefits run out, knowing that such changes may deepen their children's trauma.
Single mothers were also lost.
Among them were Rosa Julia Gonzalez, 32, who used her last phone call from the World Trade Center to ask her sister to care for her 12-year-old daughter, and Elizabeth Darling, 28, whose 2-year-old son, Michael, will go live with his father. Yamel Merino, 24, had said she wanted her 8- year-old son, Kevin, to live with his grandmother if anything happened to her, said a family friend, Maureen Niciu. But now his father may try to get custody, Ms. Niciu said, and added, "I just hope they'll respect the mom's wishes." It fell to her to tell Kevin his mother had died. "His face just dropped like his whole world had ended," she said.
Hector Tirado Jr., a firefighter, left five children, ranging in age from 6 to 11.
"Their sense of loss is palpable," said Mr. Tirado's uncle Robert Tirado. "You can just be with them and they're all sad. We try to make them play with each other and other kids, like normal kids, but you can't avoid it." Hector Tirado had separated from his wife three years ago. With his death, "that's losing their father twice," his uncle said.
Gene Springer had raised his stepdaughter, Samantha Fishman, as his own; she generally saw her father every other weekend. But her mother, Lucy Fishman, 36, died in the World Trade Center. And so in a week, 11-year-old Samantha will leave her home, school and friends in Brooklyn and move to Long Island to live with her father and his wife. She will leave behind her 3-year-old half- brother, Jason Springer, who will stay in Brooklyn with his father.
"That day is going to be horrible," said Mr. Springer, 33, who had been a stay-at-home dad while his wife worked as an executive secretary at the Aon Corporation. "Half my family is gone." Jason, meanwhile, has not asked once for his mother, Mr. Springer said, although he was very close to her. Instead, he clings to his father. Mr. Springer said that perhaps he is lucky that his son is so small. "At this age he's `Winnie the Pooh' and `Blue's Clues.' He's fortunate. Ignorance is bliss."
The older the child, the less ignorant. Eighteen-year-old Zachary Zion, a senior at Greenwich High School in Connecticut who lost his father, is trying to be there as much for his mother as she is there for him. "I need to rewrite my essays for college and I need to take into account more than just myself," he said. "I need to reconsider where everyone would be best off. It will not be the easiest thing to adjust to going away from home and leaving Mom. I do hope to study business and follow in my dad's footsteps, though. It was something he always inspired in me."
Recognizing that how children understand death depends on their age, many schools, religious institutions and counseling centers are scrambling to prepare for huge numbers of bereaved students.
At Willard Elementary School in Ridgewood, N.J., six children from three families lost their fathers in the attack. Teachers coached other students on how to approach grieving peers. Expressing sorrow and offering help were acceptable, the students were told; asking "pointed, specific questions," like whether a body had been recovered, was not.
For the most part, said Marianne Williams, the principal, children with lost parents have been making it through the school day. "I think fragile is probably the best word" to describe their state of mind, she said.
School officials and counselors know that signs of trauma and mourning may take months to manifest, and then may not look like mourning at all. Children may start struggling academically, or pick fights. And counselors believe that the rescue operation's protracted nature will complicate the grieving of young children, who already cannot comprehend death's finality. The idea that their parents were "missing," that there was hope that they would be found, may make it harder to grasp that they will not return.
Grief counselors do not yet know whether the usual methods for working with bereaved children will apply. Ordinarily, for example, children do not like to talk about the loss of a parent because it makes them feel different from their peers. But the widespread nature of this trauma and its graphic documentation may change that, Ms. Kreitzman said. "There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Does that create a collective identity for children, knowing there are others? Or does it make it harder, because it is so collective, and in some ways anonymous?"
Some surviving parents say they are so grief-stricken they can barely function around their children. And they have no way of explaining "why" to their children, since they cannot explain it to themselves.
And then there is the question of what comes next. The counseling of bereft children usually focuses on normalizing lives, restoring routines. It is hard to do that when fear and anger are in the air, and the country seems on the edge of war.
nytimes.com |
