The Date That Froze Time

Donna Caballero and her husband, Al, weren't thrilled about taking on a fifth child. But just days before Lang, a stock trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, was killed, she had asked Donna to become executor of her estate and Mike's possible guardian. Donna had agreed.

The other alternative, Mike's father, living somewhere out West, wasn't someone anyone in the family wanted to see the boy living with.

Mike Rogers and the Caballeros moved into the house his mother had owned, an elegant white home in Middletown with a swimming pool. Rogers, who had a history of drinking and using illegal drugs, resumed some of his bad habits. But he managed to get into Georgetown University.

He says that soon after he turned 18, in late September 2002, Donna Caballero told him he was no longer welcome at home. Caballero denies this, saying he was given a choice between continuing his destructive ways and having a family and a foundation to support him.

He stayed at Georgetown a year and a half. Assets from his mother's estate helped him pay tuition, room and board, and he hired a lawyer to regain possession of his mother's house. Of those first couple of years after Sept. 11, Rogers recalls in a telephone interview, "I was trying to do Georgetown on my own, then this whole court case on my own. It sucked. The only silver lining was that it built character."

Then came the baby. After leaving Georgetown, Rogers returned to Middletown, and, with his legal effort to regain his mother's house in limbo, bought a townhouse. He picked up jobs as a physical therapy aide, then a waiter. Nicole Lane, a girlfriend, moved in with him, and gave birth to a baby whom they named Michael. Suddenly the world got bigger than just him and his mother's death.

This spring, he phoned Georgetown and asked to re-enroll. If he's accepted, money from the survivors' fund will enable him to attend school full time and support his family, he said. He'd like to go to law school, perhaps into politics after that.

His big world is about to expand. Nicole is pregnant again. Though not married to her, Rogers refers to her as his wife.

"I wish I could have graduated on time. All of my Georgetown friends are graduated and will be gone when I get back. But I look at the other side, too. I have a wonderful wife, wonderful son, soon I'll have a wonderful daughter. Of course, it's hard because I miss my mom. I'd love for her to see her beautiful grandchildren."

Rosanne Lang was one of 12 children, a self-made success. Her son, an only child, has no doubt what she'd be telling him right now: "If you want to live in the world, you have to make the world the one you want to be in."

Getting On With Her Life

About two years ago, Freddye Carter, then 20, took a part-time job as a civilian cashier in the commissary at Fort Myer in Arlington. She found the job online and was hired without telling anyone about her mother.

She drives to work now in her Ford Expedition, which she paid for herself, passing by her mother's grave at Arlington National Cemetery on her way to the 3-to-11 p.m. shift.