The Date That Froze Time

"When I get up in the morning, before I do anything else, I sit on the edge of that bed," she says, pointing to her single. "I ask myself, what have I got to accomplish today? Tomorrow is not a promise to anybody."

'Life Really Is Like This'

One evening in early May, Melissa Shulman, 22, and friends from college went to see the new movie "The Da Vinci Code" in a theater near Princeton, N.J. As the first preview started to roll -- nothing more than a shot of the Manhattan skyline on a sunny day -- she froze. She knew what was coming: the trailer for Oliver Stone's much-touted new film, "World Trade Center," a movie capturing the collapse of the buildings that took the life of her dad, Mark Shulman, a fire protection engineer.

Her first instinct was to leave. But that would have meant scrambling over a half-dozen people. The trailer is only two minutes, she told herself. You can do this. She stayed in her seat, but started to cry, and a girlfriend took her hand.

Some people handle tragedy better than others. Shulman, in the beginning, thought she would be one of the strong ones. In the fall of 2002, she entered Princeton with a keen interest in chemistry. "I pretty much got through freshman year. I loved it," she recalled. "Go for the best," her dad had always told her. She was doing that.

But something happened in the second semester of her sophomore year. In spite of the emotional support she got from her mom, she couldn't concentrate on her work and could barely make it to class. Was she simply experiencing sophomore slump? She didn't know. It's the curse of those who experience severe trauma early in their lives: They will always question failures of spirit that could, in fact, happen to anyone.

"There was no trigger," she said. "I guess everything about September 11 just kind of hit me."

She took a leave of absence and enrolled that next fall semester at Monmouth University, a state school in West Long Branch, N.J. She found a therapist. She gave Princeton one more try during her junior year, withdrew, then got an office job in New York with the Mayor's Volunteer Center. Her spirits improved, and last fall she re-enrolled at Monmouth, from which she will graduate next year with a major in politics.

As much as she wishes the world would let her be, she is able to admit that she also has needed its help. She bristles slightly at the suggestion of a contradiction.

"Of course, lots of kids lose a parent to disease, or terrible disaster," she says. "But those kids don't have to see something every day on the news that reminds them of the event that took their parent. I don't ask to turn on the news and see yet another broadcast about the 9/11 memorial being delayed, or the trial of Moussaoui replayed. . . . The constancy of it all is the hardest part. It makes it almost impossible to take that next step and move on."

Before Sept. 11, she says, she thought of herself as a "forever optimist." She clung to that attitude for a while, believing that the attacks were random, her father the victim of a circumstance that could never happen again. "Life isn't like this," she told herself.

Of late, she has come to realize that "wait a minute, life really is like this." Bad things happen, really bad things. She'll encounter other obstacles, she says, but "if I can get through this, they'll be a breeze."

Monmouth has been a good fit for her, she says. She's considering applying to AmeriCorps or Teach for America after graduation, then going to law school. Like Mike Rogers, she toys with the idea of entering politics, although she confesses -- and one can almost see a smile tugging at one corner of her mouth -- that "my dream job is to be a sportscaster for ESPN."