In July 2001, Eamon Stewart, then aged 11, and his older brother Francisco, 13, were given a treat by their father. Michael Stewart had just started a job as a senior executive at a financial trading firm, Carr Futures, and he took the boys to his office way up on the 92nd floor of the north tower of the World Trade Centre.
Eamon was used to his father working in sparkling skyscrapers — he was a Wall Street guy, after all. But this was exceptional. “I remember looking out of the window and thinking: ‘Wow! I can see everything!’ and being so blown away by how far up in the air it was,” Eamon says.
Michael Stewart was a hands-on dad, big on sport, the kind who wrestles with his kids and takes them on outdoor adventures. Born in Belfast, he had moved to New York in 1981 to marry Eamon’s mother, Diana, a New Yorker he had met while he was at Stirling University.
When Eamon was seven, his parents divorced, but he still saw his dad regularly. He spent the weekend before 9/11 throwing a football around with his father and brother in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The three were due to reconvene at a Yankees game the following Wednesday, September 12, but Michael never made it.
Eamon was in the middle of a Spanish lesson at school in New Jersey when a classmate entered the room and announced that he’d seen on TV a plane hit one of the World Trade Centre buildings. “I didn’t register at first — my dad had worked there for such a short time. And it was so early in the morning that he wouldn’t be in there yet. I wasn’t panicked or nervous or anything.”
In the next lesson, maths, there was a message over the intercom calling Eamon into the headteacher’s office. He found his mother there, “so I thought this must be serious”.
Much later, he learned that Michael had been called into work early that day for a meeting of his firm’s top executives. Normally, he would get to work by about 9am. American Airlines Flight 11 hit the north tower at the 94th floor at 8.46am. Though he was two storeys beneath the plane, the impact of the crash jammed the boardroom door, and Michael and all the other executives were trapped inside.
9/11 kids club
The death of Michael Stewart earned Eamon membership of a very rarefied club — the society of 9/11 children. Almost 3 000 boys and girls under 18 lost a parent in the attacks, passing the events of that terrible day and the 10 years that have come since through the peculiarly distorting — or perhaps clarifying — lenses of childhood.
In Eamon’s case, the first few weeks after 9/11 were a haze. For days, he refused to accept his father was dead. Then one morning, his mother came into his bedroom and said: “We have to give up, it’s over.”
“I cried. I just remember crying and my mum hugging me. Then a friend came in and asked me what I’d like to do more than anything. I said I wanted to play soccer, so that’s what we did, we went to play in the park. That’s all I remember of that day.”
After a few weeks Eamon returned to school and discovered that membership of the 9/11 kids club carried with it burdens on top of the bereavement that any child who has lost a parent must endure. There was also the hugely public nature of his father’s death to deal with.
“Honestly, I don’t know what was worse — the weird or silent looks people gave me, or when people would say, ‘I’m sorry about your dad’, because both of them, even people offering me kind words, they singled me out.
“The thing I wanted more than anything else was to be treated like anybody else and to have some normalcy return to my life. It’s hard for a bunch of 11-year-old kids to wrap their heads around the fact. So that was a hard thing — being not intentionally ostracised, but feeling like that anyway.”
He and his brother became known as the “9/11 kids” in their area of New Jersey, and that labelling both pushed them away from friends around them and drove the two of them closer together. Through counselling groups he also got to know other 9/11 children, many of whom remain good friends 10 years on.
Two years after the attacks, some of his father’s remains were identified among the vast mountain of rubble, and the family were able to bury him in a cemetery just a couple of blocks from his mother’s house in New Jersey. He realised how crucial the funeral had been when a few months later he went to a third anniversary commemoration of 9/11 at Ground Zero.
“You could tell which families had recovered remains and which hadn’t. The ones that hadn’t would be making little clumps of dirt in the ground and some kind of structure or form. Seeing that made me realise how lucky our family had been — at least we were able to bury him properly.”
Over the past 10 years he has progressed through Montclair high school in New Jersey to Fordham University in New York, where he now studies science and psychology. He’s hoping after he graduates next spring to work in public policy as a way of giving back to the many people who helped him after 9/11. “Emotionally, it’s been easier than it could have been because of the kindness of people. The least I can do is give something back.”
Though his sadness has receded, he knows he will never escape 9/11. “There’s no closure, no true finality. It’s such a continuous story there’ll always be something reopening wounds.”
When Osama bin Laden was killed, Eamon was in New Zealand on an academic exchange at Auckland University. Nobody there knew he was a 9/11 child. “I found out through a text from my brother, and I immediately felt dizzy. I felt I was going to fall over. All the emotions I felt on 11 September came rushing back.
“All of a sudden, I was being forced to reassess all the things I’d felt as an 11-year-old. It was odd to feel transported back to a child.”
Now aged 21, he has grown into a man who takes an intense interest in world politics. Though his friends ridicule him for it, he reads Foreign Affairs magazine and the Economist because, he says: “Beyond the grief I really want to know what happened and figure it out for myself.”
He thinks of his father every day, not in some remorseful or sorrowful way, but just because something he sees or hears always reminds him of Michael. Then there are all the rites of passage that his father missed: high school graduation, next year’s college graduation. “The logical phases of my life — all of them, since I was 11 — my dad hasn’t been there for me and he’ll continue not to be there.”
Ten years on, Eamon has a message for the people who took his father from him: “They haven’t won. I’m still here. I haven’t been crushed by this. Whatever they were hoping would happen to me, it didn’t.”
He also has a message to the child that he was on the morning of 11 September 2001. “If I could tell my 11-year-old self something now, it would be this: ‘It will be all right.'” – guardian.co.uk