ASKING RIDGE, N.J.–At breakfast one morning this summer, Patrick Hannaford, 3, told his mother that he had scaled the tallest tree in the backyard searching for his father. "I climbed to the top," Patrick said, "and I still couldn't get into heaven." Every night, even now, Patrick asks Daddy to come down, but he's not coming home. "Daddy's not a good listener," Patrick tells his mom, Eileen Hannaford, 32, "because he's not listening." The little boy doesn't understand why his dad would be with God or why God would want him there. "He doesn't want Daddy helping him spiritually," says Eileen Hannaford. "He wants him down here physically. He wants to give him real kisses and real hugs."

All over the New York metropolitan area, wives without husbands, mothers without sons, and children without parents are struggling to explain the unexplainable, to heal wounds, salve grief, and stabilize families busted apart by the events of 9/11. Young families in New Jersey's commuter suburbs were especially hard hit in the attacks; the township that includes Basking Ridge lost 17 of its more than 26,000 residents. In this little town, the grieving process developed its own ground zero–St. James Roman Catholic Church. Here, every Thursday, families of 9/11 trudge into a church basement and find solace in each other. The room has become a weekly refuge for a mostly female group of 74 relatives, a place where women can leave behind the brave fronts to cry and to vent, to hurt and to hope. "I'd melt every time I'd go," says Katy Soulas, 35, a widow with six young children. "It's like a long, hot shower." As the anniversary of 9/11 approaches, Soulas and the others left behind are still flocking to St. James in search of spirituality, comfort, and closure. If they are ever to become whole, or even partly whole, many believe it will happen here.

Big as it is now, the St. James get-together almost never happened, because Pam Koch, the certified bereavement counselor leading the group, nearly didn't make it herself. On September 11, Koch was lying in bed recuperating from a seven-hour operation. A breast cancer survivor, Koch had allowed doctors to remove her second breast as a precautionary measure. She felt weak that morning, so tired she couldn't help immediately. A week later, though, Koch had recovered enough to drive to the red brick cathedral at the top of the ridge. After Sunday mass at St. James, Msgr. William Capik, 72, waded through the crowd and approached her. "I need you," he said.

Koch agreed to set up a bereavement support program for the 17 families in town who had lost relatives in the disaster. When the group first met in the basement banquet room October 4, the women sat among candles in a horseshoe configuration and cried uncontrollably for three hours. On their lapels they pinned pictures of loved ones accompanied by red, white, and blue ribbons, and each woman told her September 11 story. Jeanne Reinig, 49, was so drained that she fell asleep afterward for two hours. A psychiatrist told her to stop going, that it wasn't healthy. Reinig skipped a few meetings but came back to the group convinced it was the best therapy for her.

In those first weeks, Reinig, a peppy, outgoing mother of two college-age boys, couldn't comprehend that some of the women had talked to their trapped husbands. Reinig hadn't heard from her husband, Tom, a Cantor Fitzgerald eSpeed executive. Koch had assigned the women "buddies," and Reinig's first buddy had told her about a final conversation. "I don't believe her," Reinig thought. "She's crazy. They all went immediately. They were dead. Nobody suffered." Reinig wouldn't give her buddy her card. "I'm not ready to be a buddy," she said.

The progress of the group was halting, but the women seemed to embrace one another's company. By the third week, they'd told friends in neighboring towns, and the group grew to 38 people, mostly widows, but also siblings, fiancées, and parents. Koch often reached deep into her counselor's toolbox. "If I asked you what bereavement was, what would you say?" she asked one day. "Bereavement sucks," responded one soft voice. "All right, that's a good one," Koch said. "Why don't we all say it?" So they chanted "Bereavement Sucks," and Koch exhorted them to scream louder. "BEREAVEMENT SUCKS!" Outside, Monsignor Capik walked by with a raised eyebrow.

Around that time, "the saddest little person I'd ever seen" came in with a newborn, Koch recalls. Stacey Staub, 31, was wearing husband Craig's oversize clothes. Craig Staub, 30, a Keefe, Bruyette & Woods senior vice president, had been stuck above the impact zone on the 89th floor of the south tower. Eleven days later, on September 22, Stacey Staub had given birth to a baby girl, Juliette. Then she promptly lost 30 pounds in three weeks. When she joined the group, Staub wasn't eating and wore no makeup; her long black hair was bedraggled. As she gazed at the other women, Staub immediately sensed that she was no longer alone in her pain. "I was astounded," she says, "that all these women looked just like me."

For the women to take the first step toward healing, Koch told them, they had to acknowledge their losses–and many of them couldn't because their husbands' bodies hadn't been recovered. Up to four months later, some of the women were expecting their husbands to walk in to their homes. The women and men also had to work through their anger. They were mad at the steel–how could it melt? They were losing faith in the U.S. government–how could it have failed to prevent the murders? They were horrified that their loved ones had died in an inferno. Koch told the women that the smoke put the victims to sleep. "They didn't know what hit them," she said. As a counselor, Koch wanted them to endorse that explanation. A lot of them did. Some didn't.

The children were also tortured by the early stages of grief, Koch realized, and needed help. Katy Soulas, a blond-haired nurse whose quiet voice masked a tough interior, was pregnant with her sixth child when her husband, Tim, a Cantor Fitzgerald partner, was killed in the north tower. She and the children watched the towers fall on television and then sat in disbelief as the networks showed Arab children dancing in the streets. "Mommy, why are they so happy this happened?" one of her kids asked. Koch wanted to help the Soulas children work through their bitterness, so one day in the fall she took the four older boys out to a field. She brought boxes and magic markers and asked for ideas of what to write on them; "something you're angry at," she said. "Osama bin Laden," they all yelled out. When they finished kicking, the boxes were unrecognizable. "They were in shreds," says Koch, "just like these little boys were."

As they compared notes, Katy Soulas and the others found that their kids shared similar problems. The 12-year-olds all had trouble in school. The 9- and 10-year-olds experienced emotional outbursts, beating on their younger siblings at the slightest provocation. Some of the 5- and 6-year-olds misinterpreted Dad's death as a festive occasion. Matt Soulas, then 5, "was having a great time" in the weeks after September 11, says his mother. Cousins were staying in the house, so he always had play dates. Strangers brought presents. Matt quickly learned how to work the crowd. When someone gave him a Beanie Baby and the dog ate it, Matt announced, "I don't want another Beanie Baby. I want a Game Boy game." Katy Soulas had to put her foot down. "This is not a party that Daddy died," she told Matt. Katy Soulas appreciated the gifts but also wanted people to understand that "there's nothing that can replace their father. And that was difficult for people to understand."

In the weeks before Thanksgiving, some of the women grew agitated that life for many seemed to continue as usual. "People are shopping in stores, and don't they know our husbands died?" Koch says of the prevailing attitude. The women asked if they could meet more often–like every day. They wanted to be in the church together on Thanksgiving and Christmas, but Koch felt it would be unproductive. "I do a disservice to you," she said. "I take away your life from you." She did think it beneficial for them to sit together the day before Thanksgiving. In previous bereavement groups, she had counseled the grievers to write letters and burn them afterward, because the smoke would rise to the heavens. But these women couldn't deal with fire or smoke, so she gave them journals. "I journaled through my illness," Koch says. "And what's great is that I could look back on it and see how far I'd come .... And that will help them, too." For the opening entry, Koch asked them to write a letter to their loved ones and a letter back from them. Eileen Hannaford tearfully jotted down a note to her husband, Kevin, a Cantor Fitzgerald energy trader. Four months pregnant, Eileen had been walking out of the World Trade Center PATH commuter rail station when the first plane hit the north tower. Kevin was aware his wife was coming into the trade center that day, and it upset her that he died not knowing if she survived, or if Patrick had been orphaned. Eileen wrote that she was trying to take care of herself so that she could deliver a healthy baby. She was trying to be a good listener for Patrick, who was waking up in the middle of the night screaming, "Why can't the ladder reach Daddy? Why doesn't he jump on the ladder?" "At least I can be there for him," she wrote. In the journal, Eileen had Kevin writing back to her, "You're the best mom ever!"

December marked nine weeks together–the standard duration for bereavement groups. The women had progressed, Koch says, but many remained in shock, numb, and drained. By then the group had ballooned to 65, and everyone agreed they had to continue. Koch suggested that they consider traveling over the holidays, to take a break. Jeanne Reinig flew to Vail with her two boys, Christopher, 21, and Scotty, 20, and a wooden urn filled with ashes from ground zero–a gift to victims' families from New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. The prior two winter breaks the Reinig family had skied the fabled Colorado ski area with their father. On Christmas Day, the Reinigs carried the urn up the Poma lift to the rugged Siberia Bowl–Tom and the boys' favorite slope–and emptied it. "That's it," Jeanne told herself. In the evening, she fell into a deep, peaceful slumber, her first since September 10.

For New Year's, Koch tried to give the group a week off, but she relented when the women booed. On January 3, Koch asked them for New Year's resolutions. Stacey Staub said she had started to come to terms with the loss of Craig. "My New Year's resolution is to be in acceptance," she told the group, "but it's what I call miserable acceptance." She cried bitterly. Still, Koch felt Staub's resolution indicated progress. Physically, Staub was starting to look human; she cut her hair short and bought new clothes. Instead of wearing Craig's shirts, she asked a local stitching group (the "Bear Makin' Ladies") to make a few of his favorites into teddy bears. She slept with one and planned to have a quilt made from the rest. Staub says the group was helping her improve emotionally. "I find it much easier to spend time with other widows," she says, "than with my friends whose lives are still so perfect."

By then, Staub and some of the women were starting to bond outside the meetings like sorority sisters. They would go to the mall together and organize group dinners. "I don't have to tell them how sad I am," she says. "They know." For Valentine's Day, some of the women dressed up and attended a banquet. One of the widows brought another a Valentine negligee. It was the big joke for everybody, Koch says, because they were saying, Who's going to do this for me now? Some of the women made wisecracks about dating, though no one seemed ready to seriously consider it. "Who's going to want this old used car?" Katy Soulas said sardonically. "Mother of six–there's an attraction!"

Having been with her husband, Tim, since the age of 15, Soulas couldn't imagine a relationship with anybody else. "I am totally dedicated to my children," she says. For seven months after September 11, Soulas was "very comforted" that she was pregnant and "could feel Tim's life within me." Since that day, she had tried to make it through the firsts without him–Thanksgiving, Christmas, the kids' birthdays. "I was always looking forward to the event being over," she says, "and I'm not that kind of person." She was looking forward to giving birth to the baby when she learned she would have to go in for an emergency C-section and five-day hospitalization. Flat on her back in the hospital with little to do but think, unable to chase after her five kids, the reality of it all crashed down on her. "I became very sad that this baby was never going to meet his daddy," she says. In the fall, Katy had tried to fill in for Dad by doing things like throwing the football with the boys. Now, in the hospital, she realized she couldn't be both Mom and Dad. "And that," she says, "was painful."

Similar truths–awful and unvarnished–were hitting many of the women at the six-month anniversary of September 11. Hannaford suffered post-traumatic stress, which forced her to take medical disability leave from her insurance job. She kept replaying the morning of September 11, walking backward away from the north tower and watching as debris rained down. She had been in her husband's office on the 105th floor dozens of times and knew immediately that Kevin was trapped above where the plane hit. Hannaford wouldn't go back into Lower Manhattan, but she and Reinig did drive shortly after the anniversary to Liberty State Park in Jersey City. They brought along Patrick to see "The Tributes of Light" shining across the Hudson River from ground zero. By then, the two women had become "buddies," so close that Patrick called Reinig "Aunt Jeanne." As they gazed at the two giant beams of light containing their loved ones' names, tears welled up. "Both of us were fighting it," says Reinig. "But we couldn't break down in front of Patrick." On the ride home, Patrick kept muttering to himself about how the firemen didn't get there in time. "Eileen, does he do this all the time?" Reinig asked.

The answer, too often, was yes. Patrick was struggling to cope with a confusing new world and was feeling the weight of new responsibilities. At the pool, he wouldn't swim. "Daddy told me never to go in without him," he told his mother. Eileen Hannaford explained what her husband had meant and pointed out that she had gone swimming with him–without Daddy–before. "But he was here, Mommy," Patrick said. "Even if he wasn't sitting next to the pool, he was at the pool." After 45 minutes, she finally persuaded him to swim. At church, Patrick would follow around Monsignor Capik seeking answers and fatherly support. The little boy liked to play priest. "He goes around singing hallelujah, goes through the ceremonial procedures, goes through the consecration," says Eileen Hannaford. Patrick also embraced the role of big brother. In the hospital after Eileen gave birth this January, Patrick put on white doctor's gloves and fed newborn Kevin Jr. a bottle. "I'm going to take care of you," he said. "I'm the daddy."

By spring, the older boys were dealing with a raft of issues. Jeanne Reinig's sons at college were having concentration problems. Scotty at Cornell couldn't stay focused on his computer science, so a family doctor put him on the antianxiety drug Paxil. After spring break, Christopher Reinig stopped going to classes at Johns Hopkins and sat in his room. Eventually he stopped returning phone calls. On a Friday night in May, Jeanne Reinig was preparing to go down to Maryland and confront him when Christopher walked in the door. "Tom [her husband] sent him home to me," she thought. Christopher told her about his personal crisis. He always thought he wanted to work on Wall Street like his dad and now he was resisting that idea, questioning everything. He was completely falling apart. Soon after, he came home for good. The doctor put him on Paxil, too, and he began to feel better.

On June 6, 32 weeks after the group had started, Koch decided to have a party because so many of the women were having their anniversaries. A celebration seemed one way to "make lemonade from lemons," as Koch was always saying. A friend of Koch's donated a four-tiered wedding cake, and Jeanne Reinig told a rapt audience of 74 people about her 25th wedding anniversary two days earlier. She'd taken her sons to Eccoqui, one of the area's finest restaurants. Reinig asked the Rev. Giles Hayes, a close family friend, to join them. Christopher and Scotty surprised their mom with 25 roses, 24 red and 1 yellow. After dinner, Jeanne turned to Father Giles. "I'm not ready to do this," she said, "but I have to do it. I have to do this on a special day. I just can't do this on a Friday night for the heck of it. It went on special. It's got to come off special." She looked at Christopher and Scotty. "Are you sure you're OK with this?" she asked. When the boys nodded their approval, she took off her wedding ring. Father Giles blessed it and said a prayer about the meaning of the wedding band. Christopher, who hadn't previously shown much emotion, started to cry. He and Scotty got up and hugged their mother.

Afterward, Jeanne wore the ring loosely on a necklace. "I still play with it and put it on my finger," she says. "I'm not ready to take it off and send it to the jeweler yet, but it's going." Jeanne says she stopped wearing the ring in accordance with what she believes would be her husband's wish. In a sense, she knew, she was no longer married. The marriage vow, after all, says, "Till death do us part." "You move forward," she says with a sigh. "I'm not ready."

As the spring progressed, Katy Soulas grappled with the question of whether to move. She worried that people in town would gossip about her trading up from a four-bedroom house to a six-bedroom house, that they would claim the family was profiting from her husband's death. "What do I do?" she asked Koch. "That was your husband's wish," Koch told her, "to buy that house. And if people want to judge you on that, then . . . that's their hang-up." Soulas ultimately agreed; she was selling her New Jersey shore cottage, after all, and the interstate practically ran through the backyard of the new place. Because of falling interest rates, the new mortgage payments would be lower than the old ones. Who could argue with that? Soulas also continued to wrestle with jealousy. After selling the house at the shore, she ate lunch alone at a diner and found herself envious of the older retirees sitting next to each other. "I'm never going to have dinner again," she says she realized, "with Tim."

Stacey Staub was making progress emotionally and physically but remained sad and angry. She half-seriously called the Victim Compensation Fund "The Payoff" and referred to it as her "wrongful-death suit." The government "should be paying me off," she says, "because they helped kill him." She thought the American people and Keefe, Bruyette had a responsibility to support her daughter, Juliette. While she was appreciative of all the financial support, "I'd give it all back to have him here," she says. "I'd live in a shack with no plumbing and no TVs and no cellphones just to have him back. No legs, no arms? I don't care." On extended leave from her job as an Avon art director, Staub was fiercely determined to preserve the memory of Craig for Juliette, who is now 11 months old. Many mornings still, Staub plunks Juliette down in front of the television and shows an 11-minute tribute video to her dead husband. Juliette claps her hands when Craig dances, points to the screen, and says, "Da Da." They are her first words.

For Staub and the other widows, the grieving process continued this summer, step by painful step. On a bright Thursday morning, the group gathered at a mountaintop shrine to St. Joseph, patron saint of the worker, and stood facing a pair of giant World Trade Center beams with four church bells embedded in them. "Nine months," widow Laura Maler told a sea of red eyes, "sometimes feels like nine days, sometimes like nine years." One by one the women passed along a plastic mallet and tolled the bottom bell. "The bells are here," a mom told her boy, "so we don't forget your daddy or the other daddies."

Koch hopes that these rituals will help the women and men to express their grief. Nearly one year after 9/11, she sees tremendous improvement. The group members have learned "to soften the edges of grief by talking about it over and over again for 39 weeks, which is bringing them closer to functioning in life," she says. "The majority are in a growth spurt toward healing, but they are not and will never be over it." So the group will keep meeting, though no one claims it will be easy. At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, the bells on the mountaintop will toll again, and Monsignor Capik will deliver a private mass at the shrine for these women. Eileen Hannaford planned to attend. Katy Soulas was torn between going to the ceremony or taking her kids away on a day trip. Jeanne Reinig was thinking about visiting Christopher or Scotty, both of them by then, she hoped, back at school. Stacey Staub, who had been dreading the anniversary, announced to the group in midsummer that she was no longer afraid. Staub said she didn't think she would plan anything extraordinary on that day because for her, every day is September 11.