Aidan Fontana last saw his father two years ago. Dave was in Aidan’s bedroom, sitting on a rocking chair that he had made for his son out of branches brought down by a winter storm. He didn’t say much, but it was good to have him there.
In the early days Aidan used to see Dave and his friends quite often. There was the angel who sat on his bed with wings that emerged from his firefighter’s clothes. Or the time when Aidan looked out of the window of a plane and shouted: ”I see Daddy on the clouds! I can see him!”
But that was when Aidan was just five and the events of September 11 2001 were still raw. Five years on, his father’s appearances have trailed off. Aidan no longer takes them literally, though he does remember them fondly. ”Even though I know it’s not real, it’s still cool to see him.”
Aidan — the only child of one of 343 fire fighters who died trying to save others when the twin towers collapsed — is an unwilling member of a macabre club: the almost 3 000 boys and girls who lost a parent that day.
As the anniversary approaches, Aidan and all the other children of 9/11, together with their remaining parents, will once again be overwhelmed by the reality of their bereavement.
The clamour has already started, with two 9/11 films in the cinemas and television advertisements for gold-plated Ground Zero medallions (”at $49,99 the best investment you’ll ever make”).
The anniversary fever will underline both what the children have lost but also their special status, as his mother Marian is all too aware: ”I often wonder how odd it will be for Aidan and all the children of 9/11 to have the site where their parents were murdered the most popular image in modern history.”
She is author of a powerful memoir of the aftermath of the attacks and president of the 9/11 Families Association, which campaigns on issues of concern to bereaved families such as the memorial at Ground Zero. Though she has tried to shield Aidan from images of the burning towers, she thinks the uniqueness of what happened five years ago is now a core part of him. ”It seared itself into his mind. It’s part of his consciousness because of the very public nature of it.”
That public nature has had another unexpected result: the club of 9/11 children have been more thoroughly studied and the impact of the trauma on them more deeply analysed than in any previous disaster. Professor Claude Chemtob has led a team at the Mount Sinai school of medicine in New York that has calculated in the absence of official statistics that 2 752 children under 18 at the time of the attacks lost a parent. Most of the children — 86% — lost fathers, and most lived in New York or New Jersey. Their average age was eight.
Dr Thomas Demaria has tracked the progress of 350 bereaved families, including 750 children, since the attacks. He runs the WTC Family Centre of South Nassau Communities hospital, in a converted warehouse in Long Island. Its walls are lined with messages from children to their fathers.
A message signed ”the Princess Amy” says: ”Dear Dad, I love you so much. So much has happened. I try so hard to make you proud. I wish you were here to share it.” ”Daddy,” says another, ”seeing the new Star Wars movie wasn’t the same without you.” ”Daddy, how is your time in heaven?” says a third.
In the art room, children have painted what they miss most about their parent. There are two matchstick people on a boat, one labelled ”Dad” the other ”Me”. In another picture two figures, their arms outstretched like crucifixes, stand as a baseball flies between them.
Some of the paintings are darker. In one, a boy is depicted standing alongside a group of five other children, with a thick black line separating them. ”I feel better on my own,” the eight-year-old artist explained.
Demaria has taken the emotional temperature of the children over the years. In the days after the attacks he noticed a numbness among many of the children, which over time was replaced by expressions of anger: toys would be smashed, dolls run over with toy trucks, brick towers knocked over.
Many children displayed separation anxiety — they could not bear to be out of the sight of their remaining parent. Others would phone their father’s cellphone and insist, on hearing the voicemail message, he was still alive.
In the aftermath of the attack, the children of 9/11 were swamped with attention. They were given free toys, and tickets to big baseball matches with trips to meet the stars after the game.
”A child loses a parent in terrible circumstances, and the result is a shower of presents. Where’s the grief in that? That can be confusing and detrimental, as it encourages a child to hide their grief,” Demaria said.
Some 9/11 families reported to the centre that they were having their rubbish bags rifled through by curious neighbours or the media. A few of the children complained they were being bullied at school, picked on because they were deemed somehow to be different. ”Your Dad’s not a hero” other kids were heard muttering.
At worse, Demaria found, that could lead to children becoming fearful and withdrawn, avoiding anything that reminded them of September 11. Many children had trouble sleeping and were anxious about their remaining parent — classic symptoms of stress.
Those symptoms were not confined to the bereaved children. Professor Chemtob and Dr Robert Abramovitz conducted a study for the Jewish Board of Family and Children with some of the 10 000 children who lived and went to school in the vicinity of Ground Zero. They saw children from 246 families, many of whom witnessed the collapse of the towers from their school window.
The study revealed high levels of stress among the children. Seemingly trivial things trigger bouts of anxiety — a plane flying through a clear blue sky — suggesting that the traumatic impact of 9/11 has left its mark.
Aidan is not without his emotional scars too. For months after the event he had nightmares. He dreamed once that he saw his father in a supermarket with smiling faces all around him and then his father turned on him and chased him. On another occasion he asked his mother if a plane was going to crash into their house.
Five years on Aidan, aged 10, shows an acute interest in anything about the attacks. He has read parts of the 9/11 Commission report and learned about al-Qaeda. ”It is dumb that they did what they did over religion. They shouldn’t have attacked innocent people.”
He still has his down moments. The other night he woke up fretting that he could no longer remember his father’s voice. When Marian and he moved from Brooklyn to a new house in Staten Island, partly to get away from memories of 9/11, he started having nightmares again.
Three weeks ago he retrieved all his father’s belongings from the cellar, and he now has them proudly displayed in his bedroom alongside an enormous pile of cuddly toys given to him by well-wishers after the attacks. There is a framed certificate honouring Dave for the rescue work he did in a Texan flood disaster, tins of firefighting badges that he used to collect and sea shells gathered from his summers as a life guard.
”I thought it would be cool to have his things out, so that when I think of my Dad I can look at them,” Aidan said.
There are no more angels now, and the nightmares are abating. Dave, though, is still very much with him, in thought if no longer as a vision. ”I think of him every time I’m feeling lonely,” Aidan said. – Guardian Unlimited Â