FOR Lauren Eberling, tomorrow is an anniversary and a birthday. Her father Dean, a financial analyst, died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the day she turned 10. She refused to celebrate her birthday that year until her daddy came home, but he never did.

This year she will have a few friends round for her 15th birthday. They will have some cake but it won’t be much of a party.

Lauren is one of 3,051 children who lost a parent in spectacularly public fashion on 9/11. While the rest of America commemorates the fifth anniversary of their loss with television marathons, a memorial service at ground zero and an address by President George W Bush, they will be mourning privately.

Sometimes the pressure to grieve gets a bit much. Lauren will be skipping the moment’s silence that her school in New Jersey has planned. The year before, she hated it. “Everybody just looks at you and then it’s over.” Her schoolmates can go back to their games and laughter.

“How would you feel if somebody decided to talk about your parent’s murder whenever they felt like it?” said Daniel Gensler, a psychologist who has counselled dozens of September 11 families. “Kids have their own timing. It’s a very private thing.”

There are a few spendthrift merry widows and family feuds over compensation money, but most families are bearing their loss with extraordinary dignity; none more so than the children, who are coping with utterly changed horizons.

Unexpected reminders of the tragedy keep on coming. The Eberlings first received fragments of Dean’s remains in 2002 and solemnly buried them. A year later, some more bits of body arrived. Last week they learnt that the New York medical examiner had awarded a $1.5m contract to a firm that will carry out enhanced DNA testing on 9,797 remaining shards that have yet to be identified.

Lauren’s mother Amy is tempted to decline the option to know if any more of Dean is found — it opens too many fresh wounds — but Lauren would rather be told. Her mother can sometimes be overprotective, Lauren feels. This year it has been impossible to escape the September 11 films, such as United 93 and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.

When a trailer comes on television, Amy “flips out” and rushes to cover her daughters’s eyes. She has also told Lauren she can change her birthday to September 12 but Lauren would rather stick with it. She just doesn’t like mentioning the date.

The start of the school year is a time of dread for many families. As fate would have it, some parents escaped the attacks because they were escorting children to their first day at school in 2001 but three-year-old Katie Tselepis’s nursery school began a day earlier.

Her mother Mary was heavily pregnant at the time with Will, now nearly five, when her husband Bill lost his life on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center. Katie, 8, can remember how her father helped to brush her teeth and give her baths, and she sometimes says to Will, not unkindly: “It’s so sad you never got to see Daddy.” His mother tries to comfort him, saying his father loved to feel her bump.

It is Will who is eager to know everything about the tragedy. “He asks, how did Daddy die and how did the buildings fall down?” Tselepis said. One day, when he was crying about something unimportant, she said, “You only need to cry when you are really hurt.” Heartbreakingly, he responded: “Did Daddy cry when he died?”

Tselepis prefers her local September 11 memorial in New Jersey to ground zero, where all the grandiose plans for a skyscraper city remain obstinately on the drawing board.

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