Dealing with a parent's death is hard enough. But Hilary Strauch has had to do it in a fishbowl By JODIE MORSE

Posted Sunday, September 1, 2002; 3:38 p.m. EST
ilary Strauch is a 12-year-old whose favorite TV channel is the Food Network. It's not that she's particularly fond of cooking—she doesn't make much beyond cake from a box—but after a year of careful study, she's found that it's the one station that doesn't show her father's murder.

Watching the news is clearly out of the question. So is MTV, which also airs footage of the tumbling World Trade Center. Even the kid-friendly Animal Planet ran a feature on rescue dogs that sifted through debris at ground zero. "Emeril is my favorite because he's so funny and distracting," says Hilary. "I don't care so much about what he actually cooks, just that he never says anything about Sept. 11."

Losing a parent is hellish in any instance. Hilary had the added horror of seeing hers vanish, suddenly and surreally, on TV. That morning her father George called home twice from his office at the insurance broker Aon on the 99th floor of the south tower—once calmly, the second time choking on tears—to assure her mother Ginny that he was O.K. and was being evacuated. Several hours later, Hilary, watching TV along with the rest of her sixth-grade class, saw one of the endless replays of her father's office building collapsing in a heap.

From that moment forward, her grief unspooled on a public stage, and everyone wanted a hand in her recovery. Strangers sent their sympathy wrapped in handmade quilts, Lego sets and vip passes to U.S. Space Camp and Bruce Springsteen concerts. One day a shaky Mary Tyler Moore went on cnn to read a poem by an Aon employee detailing how Hilary's dad had talked to co-workers about his daughter. In her hometown on the Jersey Shore, Hilary was instantly cast as "the 9/11 kid." Students in her school either acted cloyingly sweet or parted ways when they saw her coming. This spring her teacher even pulled her aside and told her, "You're my hero."

In private there were assigned roles as well. Her mother was often the one who needed mothering. When Hilary attended a bereavement camp, the only place where she felt understood, even there she adopted a distinct persona: she was the most eloquent about her grief—"definitely top of the class," says camp director Lynne Hughes—and all the counselors longed to have her in their healing group. "I think it feels a little like being schizophrenic or being a character in a play who's totally different from you," Hilary says. "You have all these faces. There's one you show the people you don't know very well because if they saw the real you, it would be pretty ugly. And there's another you show to people you really, really know, like your mom."

The question is, when you're 12 years old and living and grieving in a fishbowl, which face do you show yourself?

Death, a stranger in any child's cosmos, seems grossly alien in Hilary's. She lives in a pale-yellow house a block from the ocean in Avon-by-the-Sea, N.J. The tiny town is a summer beach destination—Ginny met George on the boardwalk when she was just 17 and both were working menial hotel jobs—with a year-round population of slightly more than 2,000. Yet even in the off-season Avon retains a certain lazy, carefree air. Sweeping front porches serve as social hubs. Traffic grinds to a halt so that ducks can meander across the street. Underemployed policemen ride around on bicycles and hand out "citations" for good behavior, redeemable for free sugar cones at Beach Plum Homemade Ice Cream.

Hilary has always been one of the most frequent offenders. She began life as "the miracle baby"—Ginny tried for nearly a decade to get pregnant and finally succeeded shortly after her 36th birthday. Hilary is tall for her age and trim, with fair, freckled skin and a froth of red curls so striking that strangers stop her on the street for her autograph, insisting that she must be an actress from a Broadway production of Annie. This year, as in every other, she earned straight A's. She competes in five sports (ranking statewide in swimming), plays the piano and, in her free time, strings rosaries to give to the poor. "My life was totally set," she says. As a grownup, she planned on a two-pronged career: she would work for several decades as a patent attorney and then cash out at age 50 and teach in an inner-city elementary school. She would then move back into her childhood home because by that time, "my parents would be very old, and old people live in small houses without steps." They would have to buy the single-story ranch house next door.

And here's the true miracle: she is thoroughly unaffected. She speaks up in class but doesn't flaunt her knowledge. She has the rare ability, unsettling in an adolescent, to bob among different social circles, equally at ease with the bookworms, the jocks and the special-needs kids and, like many other only children, with adults as well. "Often when I'm around her, she's so mature that I completely forget and hear myself talking like she's one of my girlfriends," says family friend Maureen Farrington. But in other ways, Hilary is refreshingly juvenile. Her room is an absolute disaster zone, the carpet barely visible among empty ginger-ale cans and discarded Old Navy outfits. She moans about her braces; when she's excited about something, she jumps up and down and tugs on the arm of the nearest adult.

"There's absolutely nothing of me in her," jokes Ginny. Then she pauses and twirls her own schoolgirl red curls. "O.K., these came from me, but in every other way, she is a patch off her father." Indeed, the two were so stunningly similar in physique and temperament that her father's friends find it a little spooky to be in her presence. Both were lean and lanky with broad shoulders built for the butterfly stroke; and both whip-smart but very tightly wound. Though students couldn't enter the science fair until the sixth grade, George and Hilary had spent the past year scouring the Internet for the perfect project. "For a lot of years, I was basically just the team manager for the two of them and stood in the background and watched," Ginny says.

The laid-back leg of the threesome, Ginny quit her job as a high school English teacher after Hilary was born, and now works two days a week at the Avon public library. She is the one who races around to the parade of after-school lessons and practices. George had a grueling commute—two hours each way, leaving on the 5:35 a.m. train—but on evenings and weekends he was all Hilary's, supervising homework assignments, shooting hoops. You can see the closeness of the father-daughter bond in the photographs around Hilary's room. Hilary and George skiing, kayaking, golfing and eating chocolate cake. In one image, yellowing a bit from age, she is a preschooler, sitting in a red-and-green plaid dress at her father's desk at the World Trade Center. It was taken on one of her favorite days of the year, Dec. 23, when she was his official date to the annual Aon Christmas party and got to commute with him on the train.

In Hilary's world, no one had ever been seriously ill, let alone died. Indeed, it was such a blue-sky existence that George and Ginny had begun to worry about how their daughter would react when she finally faced a loss. In the spring of 2001, they started gingerly preparing her for what they thought would be the first death in the family: their 17-year-old, half-deaf cat Clancy.

What is everyone looking at?" Hilary asked Maureen Farrington on the morning of Sept. 12. Friends and relatives had descended on her house, and Farrington volunteered to distract Hilary with a day at the beach. Farrington, a peppy, blond social worker, assured Hilary that people were probably gawking, as they very often did, at her adopted Korean daughter Elizabeth, 2. But Hilary wasn't buying it; she kept wondering aloud why anyone might have reason to watch her. The rest of the time, she blithely skipped about the beach and collected shells with Elizabeth.

On one level, Hilary understood what had happened—the crumbling-towers sequence was seared in her memory—but she chose instead to believe her father's last words: I'm fine. He of all people must have known how to find the emergency exits. A safety engineer by training and an executive in risk management at Aon, George was almost comically consumed with accident prevention. He evangelized about helmets and seat belts; he even had a decibel meter that he used to measure loud music lest anyone perforate an eardrum. Hilary's dad was just a little late getting home. Maybe he was buried in the rubble, suffering from amnesia, or his cell phone was broken. Sometimes even engineers had mechanical failures.

Later that week, Ginny suggested that they donate some of George's undershirts and Argyle socks to the rescue workers. "What about when he comes home?" asked Hilary, who had said almost nothing to her mother since the towers had fallen. Ginny, who had nearly shut down from the shock, followed Hilary's lead: "Then obviously we'll buy him some more."

Hilary made it known that she would be sticking to her routines—most important of all, school. She had taken just two days off and was eager to get back. "When I walked in, everyone spread out in two rows in the hallway, like I had food on my face or something," she says. During her brief hiatus, her classmates did nothing but talk about how they should act when she returned. A few offered clumsy condolences, likening her plight to that of a distant relative's dying. One friend said she knew exactly how Hilary felt because her parents were getting divorced. Someone thought the kids should start clearing out their piggy banks to raise money for victims' families; over the next five days, the class amassed 68,000 pennies.