MONTCLAIR, N.J. _ The children of 9/11 are growing up.
Fifteen years after that cataclysmic day in 2001, the infants of the time _ or those still then in their mothers' wombs _ are high school age. Then-toddlers are nearing or even starting college. The tweens of 2001 are young adults, and their elder siblings are marking life's milestones: marrying, notching career achievements. Having children of their own.
In the arc of childhood, time bends in strange ways. The Sept. 11 attacks are part of history now. But for young people who lost a parent that day, the pain is ever present.
The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people _ aboard four hijacked airliners, at the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon. Those people left behind 3,051 children under the age of 18, by the count of survivors' groups. That day marked these youngsters' entry into a cohort of bereavement, an exclusive club that, as more than one of them observed, no one would ever, ever wish to join.
"You don't want to be that kid, the one everyone knows about," said Francesca Picerno, who had just turned 9 when the towers fell, and is now an aspiring musician. Her dad, Matthew Picerno, 44, worked as a municipal bond broker at Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 104th floor of the north tower. He left the family home in Holmdel, N.J., that morning, and never came back.
Enduring so private a grief in so overwhelmingly public a context left a mark on all of these children. It's braided, they say, into successes and sorrows alike, sometimes in wrenching and unexpected ways. It looms large over every casual encounter with a new acquaintance. It's a built-in identity some rejected _ and still do _ while others have come to accept and even embrace it.
"You don't want to be defined by it," said Picerno, now a self-possessed 24-year-old, whose professional first name is also her childhood nickname, Ces _ what her father and all the family called her. "But it's such a huge part of who you are."
When the towers fell, the world's eyes were on New York City. But the reverberations were also felt with the force of an earthquake in dozens of tranquil suburbs that lay within commuting distance of Manhattan's financial district _ communities like Montclair, N.J.
Railroad barons made the town, and its welter of train stations _ six, in a community of only 38,000 _ not only nourished the village-like neighborhoods that coalesced around these transport hubs, but made for a quick journey into the city, 12 miles away, across the river.
On 9/11, that proximity proved fateful. Almost everyone in Montclair _ from its blue-collar enclaves to its hilltop mansions _ knew someone working in New York that day: friends and neighbors, colleagues, wives and husbands, daughters and sons. Nine men from Montclair died. Seven of them were married, and most of those were fathers, some to very young children.
When Abigail Carter took a telephone call that morning from her husband, Caleb Arron Dack, she was busy at home with 6-year-old Olivia and 2-year-old Carter. With the baby fussing on her hip, she snatched up the phone, annoyed at the interruption.
Even now, 15 years later, she's sometimes haunted by the memory of that little burst of impatience at what was to be their last conversation ever. But then, it had begun as such an ordinary day. There was no reason to think they wouldn't be talking for all their lives.
"Now, I think the hardest thing is just not knowing what you're missing," Carter said. "And at the same time, knowing how much you're missing."
Montclair enfolded her in an embrace she will never forget, she said. Friends sat vigil; strangers offered greetings on her birthday. Bags of bagels and home-cooked meals appeared faithfully on her doorstep for months _ "I had to buy a new freezer for all of them," she said, mustering a laugh.
But for all the solace offered, Carter came to feel there was something suffocating about her new identity as a 9/11 widow. In so small a community, she knew that she _ and especially her children _ would be indelibly associated with immense tragedy, with even well-meaning kindness registering as a constant reminder.
In the end, she chose to make a new life for herself and them, in Seattle. The kids are 17 and 21, and doing well. Carter is in high school; Olivia is away at college, studying neuroscience and considering graduate school.
