Hilary Strauch is a 12-year-old whose favorite TV channel is the Food Network. It's not that she's particularly fond of cooking--she doesn't make much beyond cake from a box--but after a year of careful study, she's found that it's the one station that doesn't show her father's murder.
Watching the news is clearly out of the question. So is mtv, which also airs footage of the tumbling World Trade Center. Even the kid-friendly Animal Planet ran a feature on rescue dogs that sifted through debris at ground zero. "Emeril is my favorite because he's so funny and distracting," says Hilary. "I don't care so much about what he actually cooks, just that he never says anything about Sept. 11."
Losing a parent is hellish in any instance. Hilary had the added horror of seeing hers vanish, suddenly and surreally, on TV. That morning her father George called home twice from his office at the insurance broker Aon on the 99th floor of the south tower--once calmly, the second time choking on tears--to assure her mother Ginny that he was O.K. and was being evacuated. Several hours later, Hilary, watching TV along with the rest of her sixth-grade class, saw one of the endless replays of her father's office building collapsing in a heap.
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 saw her coming. This spring her teacher even pulled her aside and told her, "You're my hero."
In 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 the people you don't know very well because if they saw the real you, it would be pretty ugly. And there's another you show to people you really, really know, like your mom."
The question is, when you're 12 years old and living and grieving in a fishbowl, which face do you show yourself?