Word: griefs
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From that moment forward, her grief unspooled on a public stage, and everyone wanted a hand in her recovery. Strangers sent their sympathy wrapped in handmade quilts, Lego sets and VIP passes to U.S. Space Camp and Bruce Springsteen concerts. One day a shaky Mary Tyler Moore went on cnn to read a poem by an Aon employee detailing how Hilary's dad had talked to co-workers about his daughter. In her hometown on the Jersey Shore, Hilary was instantly cast as "the 9/11 kid." Students in her school either acted cloyingly sweet or parted ways when they...
...private there were assigned roles as well. Her mother was often the one who needed mothering. When Hilary attended a bereavement camp, the only place where she felt understood, even there she adopted a distinct persona: she was the most eloquent about her grief--"definitely top of the class," says camp director Lynne Hughes--and all the counselors longed to have her in their healing group. "I think it feels a little like being schizophrenic or being a character in a play who's totally different from you," Hilary says. "You have all these faces. There's one you show...
...Sunday in early August, Hilary and Ginny drive to another Comfort Zone Camp, where the topic of the day is the anniversary. The parents and the children divide into separate groups, but the feeling is the same in both rooms: we will not hang our grief on any timetable. The mothers spend a portion of the afternoon discussing wedding rings. About half, including Ginny, still have theirs on; a handful now also wear their husband's wedding band. The children worry about having to watch the towers fall during the television coverage of the anniversary. Hilary shares her anxiety with...
...artifice: she began acting like nothing whatever was wrong. She turned in every assignment on time with her usual fastidiousness. When kids spoke about their fathers, she interjected stories about hers (sometimes in the past tense, sometimes not). If it seemed appropriate, she affected just the right measure of grief. "Even if I was happy, I'd make myself feel just a little bit sad even if I didn't really want to," she says, "because it's how I think I was supposed to be." And no matter how empty she felt, she never ever lost it in public...
...touring ground zero, Ginny bunkered down and hardly left the immediate environs of Avon. She had, and still has, no desire to see the site. ("What would I want with construction dirt?" she is fond of asking. "It's not my husband.") In part, she was sluggish with grief. But there was something else tethering her to home. Ginny has a terrible sense of direction--on top of everything else, George had been the family compass--and she was petrified of losing her way. Then one day Hilary's principal called to say he had heard about a special daylong...