The Date That Froze Time

On 9/11, These Four Were Planning For College. Then Their Parents Died And Their Dreams Were Rearranged.

The images come at them -- not as often as they used to, but often enough. In a movie trailer before the feature presentation. On a newspaper's Web site, or on "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart." They pick up a magazine in the dentist's office and there is President Bush giving some speech or another, raising once again the specter of Sept. 11, 2001.

The day that no one will let them get beyond.

Freddye Carter lost her mother at the Pentagon that day. Mike Rogers's mom died at the World Trade Center. Melissa Shulman's dad died there too, and so did Patrick Dowdell's father.

They don't deny that the victims -- the real victims, those who died -- should be remembered. But the details that absorb the rest of us don't mean as much to them: How exactly did their parents die? At what time? Where in the Pentagon? In which tower at the World Trade Center? All the questions: Where were they when they heard the news? What was life like after that? Did the money for survivors, from federal and private sources, make them rich?

People want to make them into walking memorials, symbols, metaphors. But their parents are dead and in the end that's all that matters to them -- that, and the fact that like other 22- and 23-year-olds, they're dreaming big dreams and are busy trying to make those dreams come true.

All four would have graduated from college this spring if things had gone according to plan. They would have sat through speeches reminding them to shoot for the moon, blaze their own trail and do whatever they do with heart. The platitudes would have sailed through the air along with their mortarboards.

As it is, only Dowdell graduated.

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Sometimes Mike Rogers gets angry -- angry at the terrorists who killed his mom, angry at family members who lost patience with him, and angry at himself for losing his way for a couple of years.

But what really riles him are politicians who use his mother's death -- and the deaths of 3,000 others -- to advance their agendas. He doesn't like sounding sympathetic to terrorists, but he opposes the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the National Security Agency program to wiretap Americans. "Don't use my mom's death as a political ploy to get the country behind you," he says.

Talk about having to take charge of your own life and move on; Rogers has more than he can handle without serving as anyone's poster child.

The same day his mother, Rosanne Lang, died at the World Trade Center, Rogers, a few days shy of 17, went to live with his mother's sister in Belford, N.J.