| A single father
Mark Stryker, 53, was also outside P.S. 59 waiting to pick up his daughter Eva, 9. “I heard the news on the radio. I was at home right after I dropped her off at school. I went to the West Side and looked. I realized the gravity of the situation and I came and took her home at 10:30.” As they watched TV, he explained to her what had happened. “She knows that there were a lot of people killed; that this might be the start of another war,” said Stryker. “She senses that something serious has happened, though she doesn’t understand why and the dimensions of it. She can still be hopeful and optimistic and she can still be a child. I keep the gruesome details away. She can still be lighthearted and joking, but she knows to stay quiet because there are a lot of people out there sad and hurt. They don’t want to hear her being silly, though that’s her way of dealing with this.” They went over to a friend’s backyard to “commiserate and speculate.” He’s not sure that his being a single-father changes coping strategies. “It’s good that kids see other adults talking and over hear intelligent conversation. I assume that’s the same with spouses. I just don’t want her to listen to the garbage that people say when they’re angry. Teenagers can be stupid, too.” Eva said that at 9:45 on Tuesday the principal came into her class. She said that the World Trade Center had been hit by an airplane. “She said we didn’t have to be scared. We kept doing the reading response that we were doing before.” Today, they talked more about the event. “We were talking about why people were dancing in the street on TV,” said Eva. They probably didn’t know what had actually happened. They probably didn’t know how horrible it was.”
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Also Inthefray > Part one | Monday, October 8, 2001 Part two | Tuesday, October 9, 2001
A single father |