9/11 Babies: Five Years Later

Sept. 6, 2006 — -- Five years ago, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, every heartbeat of the babies whose fathers died was a reminder that life must go on -- even when their widowed mothers had trouble remembering why.

Today, those babies look even more like the fathers they never met, but now they shoot questions like arrows: They want to know what happened to daddy.

When Holly O'Neill's daughter asked her what happened to her father, O'Neill gave her a timeline.

"I sort of gave her a very simple chronology," she said.

"'When we came home, you were in my belly and we were both really excited and there were some bad men and they set afire to the building that your daddy worked in,'" O'Neill said she told her daughter. "He went to heaven that day along with a lot of other daddies and mommies."

Watch the full story on "Primetime" Thursday night at 10.

But O'Neill's daughter asked why she was the only child without a father.

"Then I just tell her, 'Actually, that's not true,'" O'Neill said.

Finding Love Again

Some of the widows of 9/11 have found love again.

Mary Danahy's first husband, Patrick, worked on the 90th floor of the World Trade Center and died in the attacks.

For all these years, she prayed to him for guidance about her life, she said.

Now her new husband, Andy, says he prays to Patrick, too.

"Help me be a good dad, be a good husband, what would you do, you know," Andy said he asked his wife's first husband.

Mary's daughters call Andy 'dad.'

And Still Grieving

While some of the women have moved forward, Jeanette Schardt said she couldn't.

"I still have his toothbrush in the toothbrush holder," Schardt said.

Her husband, John, was a firefighter.

He raced into the burning towers to help others. He never knew Schardt was pregnant with their third child. She got the news Sept. 12.

"If you open the closet, his jacket is still hanging there along with the rest of ours," Schardt said, noting that five years later the closet still smells of his after-shave. "It just makes me feel that he still lives there."

One boy, Paul Acquaviva Jr., told his mother, Courtney Acquaviva, that his father didn't stay in the sky after his death.

Instead, he said his dad used to come sit by him so he wouldn't be alone.

"The hair on my neck stood up, and I said to him, 'Paul, you know, Daddy died. He's, you know, not here,'" Courtney said.

"He said, 'No, when I was little he was in there,'" Courtney said. "I just stopped, and I said to him, 'What do you mean? He was in there?' He said, 'No, when I was sleeping in my crib. Daddy would be watching me.'"