Thousands of children left behind

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 newspapers?

In Chattanooga, Tenn., Kathie Scobee Fulgham understands. Fifteen years ago she watched her father die a very public death, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded during launch on Jan. 28, 1986. Dick Scobee led the mission.

"Yours is a small voice in a crashing storm of questions," she wrote in an open letter to the thousands of children whose parents died in the terrorist attacks. "But no answers will bring you comfort. And no answers will bring you closer to understanding, save one: Your Mom or Dad was in harm's way."

Fulgham remembers the horror and helplessness as she watched pieces of her father's spaceship fall from the sky. She recalls the relentless media coverage that made it seem like her father was dying a hundred times a day. Nightmarish thoughts about his broken body. Crazy hopes that he was still alive, clinging to a piece of debris in the ocean.

If only rescuers would keep searching, she thought, they would find him. Eventually they found some remains, and that made everything worse.

"Everyone saw it, everyone hurt, everyone grieved, everyone hurt," said Fulgham. "But that did not make it any easier for me." And it doesn't make it easier for these children who lost parents.

The scenes 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.

1,500 lost a parent

The scope is staggering.

From the bond trading company Cantor Fitzgerald alone, an estimated 1,500 children lost a parent. The New York Times this week estimated that up to 15,000 children may have been left without a mother or father as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. And that doesn't account for those who lost uncles, and cousins, a baseball coach, a neighbor, a friend.

"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?"

Joseph and Daniel Shea were brothers who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. They were young and handsome and smart. Between them, they left seven children, ranging in age from 7 months to 14 years.

Every child in Pelham seems to know the Sheas. Or 22-year-old Amy O'Doherty, who baby-sat for them and was such a part of the family Joseph Shea helped get her a job at his company. Or Joseph Leavey, the firefighter who worked in New York City. Last week his children were still wondering when he would come home.