In the days immediately following 9/11, Gail Sheehy went to Middletown, New Jersey, a community that lost more people in the World Trade Center than any other outside New York City. For the better part of two years, Sheehy followed the women, men and children who remained after the devastation and who continue to put their lives back together. Sheehy's Middletown, America:  One Town's Passage from Trauma to Hope , was published by Random House in September 2003 and received wide critical acclaim. Yet for Sheehy, the Middletown community and the nation, the story continues and threat remains.

In her book, and later in a series of articles for the New York Observer, Sheehy continues to tell the story of four widowed moms from New Jersey who turned their sorrow into action and became formidable witnesses to the failures of the country’s leaders to connect the dots before September 11. Sheehy follows the four moms as they fight White House attempts to thwart the 9/11 Commission.
 
In addition to her articles for the New York Observer, Sheehy is regularly featured on radio and television coverage about the failures before and the aftermath of September 11.  

Here is a sampling of her work:

03/11/2002

Sept. 11 initiated a great national passage. We as a country — and each of us individually — experienced a cataclysmic life accident. Six months later, we have separated into three worlds:

• The inner world of survivors and shattered families, for whom the trauma is cumulative. Time has brought them only an ebbing of numbness. The pain of reality is now sinking into their bones.
  
  
• The world of New Yorkers, tens of thousands of whom are expected to suffer from some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder.
  
  
• The world of everyone else, for whom the chaos of last fall may have been pacified by distance and routine. The airliner attacks and anthrax scare were confined mostly to the East Coast. And over time, as the terrorist threat seemingly has receded, so, too, have the ubiquitous American flags faded from the landscape.
  

Despite America's successes in the war on terrorism abroad, the different passages those in each world have undertaken to regain their composure during the past six months make it increasingly difficult for the nation to remain linked together in a common cause here at home.

We see evidence of that in the growing resentment of long airport security lines and overly intimate body searches. We see other signs of it as the splurge of sympathy and private contributions turns into an ugly public backlash.

Widows interviewed on talk shows are confronted with callers and e-mailers who try to shame them: "I have three words for the widow: Get a job." Or, "if $1.6 million (in compensation) is not enough for you, I hope you rot in hell."

Perhaps it is a fact of human nature that as the memory of tragedy fades we eagerly return to the mundane — or to consuming. In America, money is the great green salve, and as the economy recovers, luxury items are once again beginning to fly off the sales floor.

Many of us told ourselves in the wake of Sept. 11 and the many sad observances that followed that we'd never forget. If these angry attitudes are any guide, we've certainly forgotten about the many survivors and what it feels like to walk in their shoes.

For six months, I have been living halftime in the survivors' world, visiting with the broken families of 9/11 victims in one New Jersey town. Middletown is every suburban town in America, once a safe bucolic sprawl of a dozen hamlets. Fifty people never came home to Middletown and environs after Sept. 11. Young Port Authority police, favorite sports coaches and a heavy contingent of traders and brokers who commuted by road or ferry from the shore of New Jersey to the twin towers and returned after dark to wives whose bargain with life was to give up jobs to marry these brash young men.

Many of these widows are so young, they never contemplated mortality. All express anger. But their anger isn't really about money. It's about the injustice. Considering that 9/11 was an atrocity unimaginable to most Americans, those directly affected carry layers of sadness, fear and fury they haven't even touched yet.

Sometimes their anger is even targeted at their loved one.

"Angry at her. One hundred percent! She called me, and I told her to get the hell out. But she was so kind-hearted to people," says Kevin Laverty, who was waiting for his wife, Anna, to retire to move to a condo in St. Petersburg, Fla.

The worst of it is not having the body.

The empty aisle in the Catholic church where the casket always sits. The urn full of dust from Ground Zero that mixes a husband's charred flesh with that of terrorists.

Next worst is the not knowing.

Kristen Brietweiser's husband was at work on the 94th floor of the south tower when he called her. It was 8:50 a.m.

"Sweets, I'm fine," her husband said. "I don't want you to worry." Her husband said he'd sat down at his desk and all of a sudden his ear felt very warm. "I looked over and saw this fireball."

"What are you talking about?"

"Turn on the TV."

She watched his building explode. "I just pray he didn't see his own death," she told me weeks after. She shut her eyes and replaced the image. "I just know he immediately turned to ash and floated up to the sky."

A few weeks later, Kristen was visited by local police officers: Her husband's remains had been found. Or rather, remain. It was his arm. With his wedding ring. Unmelted. So much for the story she had told herself.

Only 10 or 12 of the deceased on Middletown detective Sgt. Joe Capriotti's list have been identified. The worst pain may lie ahead for the rest. To get a "positive identification" now is like a Second Death. It tears open the heart's grave, and the whole grieving process starts all over again.

When Pat Wotton visited Ground Zero, she rushed to the railing and shrieked, "Rod, come back! How could you leave me!"

Eight days after the tragedy, still in shock, she delivered a baby boy with serious respiratory problems. He was taken from her to spend the next three weeks in intensive care, and Pat was initially unable to bond with her baby.

Later, when Wotton opened the door for Capriotti and his news about her husband's identification — shortly before Valentine's Day — she insisted, "it can't be." The detective sat with her for three hours until the reality sank in.

Widows like these are being further traumatized by anonymous callers and letter writers who try to stigmatize them. One widow had scarcely laid her husband's unseen remains to rest when she opened an anonymous letter attacking her as a greedy person. A copy of her husband's obituary was clipped to blowups of $1,000 bills.

For the families and survivors of 9/11, no amount of the great green salve can penetrate to these unfathomable levels of loss and sorrow. Let us not add the burden of accusation and shame.