Six years later: Time passes, pain remains for 9/11 families

Barry Zelman and his younger brother, Kenneth, had a longstanding tradition of meeting up for coffee at Starbucks in quaint Denville, N.J., where, every weekend, they would sit for hours over their Americanos.

"You know how brothers are," Zelman remembers. "You talk about everything and anything. Sometimes you just sit together and laugh. I think about Ken all the time, so for me it doesn't feel like six years have past since he died."

The younger Zelman was working as a software consultant on the 99th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the building. He was 37 years old.

Barry Zelman will be attending the memorial service at Ground Zero Tuesday, just as he has every year. Yet recently he, along with many other family members of 9/11 victims, has felt some pressure to "get over it," as he puts it.

In fact, a report released last week by the World Trade Center Family Center in Baldwin found that victims' families are getting less and less emotional support from their extended families as time goes by.

"Some family members say to get on with [life] now," said one anonymous study participant. Another said, "We were originally inseparable and now we are going our separate ways."

Said Zelman : "I've been hearing talk about how this grieving needs to end, and I guess I can understand that on an intellectual level. But I'm the one who lost my brother. He went to work one morning and he had the right to come that night, but he didn't."

In another sign of what psychologists are calling "Sept. 11 fatigue," the city's top-rated station, WABC-TV, said it was not going to broadcast the reading of the 2,749 names at the city's 9/11 commemoration, as it has for the past five years.

Last week, after a vocal protest from victims' families, the station changed its plans and will air the entire reading of names.

"It's a roller coaster for most of the families, I think," said Tom Roger, whose daughter Jean, 24, was a flight attendant on Flight 11.

"This time of year, you're reminded not only of who you lost, but how you lost them. Our daughter didn't sign on to go to war, she died at work."

Roger said that many of the victims' family members refuse to visit New York at all. For many of them, it's not so much a matter of getting over their loss, as it is avoiding reminders that the loss ever happened.

Zelman is not among them.

"Some people don't want any reminders, but I feel closer to my brother when I look at things he was a part of," said Zelman.

"I go back to our Starbucks a lot. It's a very strange feeling to be there, but that was our place."