On 9/11 all she could say was, 'Is Dad OK?'

Vishnoo Ramsaroop died 10 years ago in the south tower of the World Trade Center. He was 45, a maintenance worker who supported a wife and three girls on $43,000 a year.

Tiffany, his oldest, was 8 when it happened. It was two years before she stopped believing he got hit in the head by debris and would stroll through the door having recovered from amnesia. Two more passed before she really cried.

Tiffany has walked the terrible line of people in grief, trying to move forward without forgetting. At 15, she flew to his native Trinidad and let his accent wash over her. His starched work shirt with his name ironed on the back of the collar hangs in her closet.

When she turned 18 this summer, her first act as an adult was to have her father's name tattooed on the inside of her left wrist. "Vishnoo" takes up almost the entire space.

As the nation prepares to commemorate the attacks, Tiffany won't be in lower Manhattan this morning. The reminder is just too much.

3,052 children lost a parent

America spent the last decade fighting two wars and thinking up ways to keep itself safe. Tiffany spent those years growing from a third-grader in a starched green plaid uniform to a college freshman. Yet at every milestone, at every family event, and in some part of almost every day since Sept. 11, 2001, there was a hole where her dad should have been.

That Tuesday, 3,052 children lost a parent in the terrorist attacks. The average age was 9. They came from wealth and poverty and from countries around the world. This is one child's story.

Last week Tiffany attended her first classes at Queensborough Community College. She is finding her way, asserting new independence. Yet still she is bound to her family. It was Tiffany who accompanied her sister to freshman orientation at high school last week. It was Tiffany who offered part of her earnings this summer to help her mother with bills.

During her high school graduation in June, she could almost see her father there.

"Uggghhh. … At every single event I went to I wished my dad was there, holding up the camcorder, waving as soon as I saw him," she says. "It really sucks when you go to high school graduation and you see your best friend running toward her father."

Tiffany lives in a two-family house in Queens, about two miles from LaGuardia Airport. The house is full of women - Tiffany lives there with her sisters, Ashley, 15, and Kimberly, 10, and Sita, their mother. Sita, 51, has two daughters from a previous relationship and two granddaughters, ages 4 and 3.

This is the same house Vishnoo left that morning, when the family piled into the minivan to drop him at the subway and then Tiffany and Ashley at PS 148. About all Tiffany remembers is that her uniform was new. Then everyone else's parents came early to pick them up; her mother waited until school let out.

"I went to the car and my mom was crying and I said, 'What's wrong?' And she said, 'I'll show you when I get home.' I sat down on the couch and my mom put the TV on. ... I didn't know what to say. All I could say was, 'Is Dad OK?' "

"It's like the earth opened"

Tiffany remembers her father's job as a "gardener" who planted hibiscus and greenery around the trade center's vast plazas. It was the first work he got after he came to America and he did it for 17 years.

When Tiffany didn't have school he took her to work with him. Even intact the towers were tall and scary; Tiffany stayed away from the windows. So when it was explained to her where he was that day she could clearly picture it.

Tiffany's father happened to be on the 35th floor in the south tower when the north tower was hit. He went up to the 56th floor for a better view. The last time anyone saw him he was waiting by an elevator bank to get down.

Day after day, while their mother searched hospitals, Tiffany sat on the front steps with Ashley, waiting for Dad to come home.

The first anniversary rolled around and Tiffany went happily along with her cousins to the ceremony at ground zero. She was 9, what else was she going to do? It was windy, and everybody said the dust of the deceased was swirling around. She didn't really connect.

Sita said sometimes she wonders whether cancer or a car accident might have been easier for her girls to comprehend. "The way he go, it's like the earth opened and just take him away from them."

That's how it is for a lot of Sept. 11 children. Mental-health experts call this "ambiguous loss." Moving on is complicated for children whose grief stems from an event so public.

"There are going to be more than 40 shows on TV about 9/11 just for this anniversary, so you can't avoid it," said Fran Furman, director of counseling at Tuesday's Children, a support group that has worked with nearly 6,000 members of Sept. 11 families. "Every time they show pictures of the towers exploding, our children and families look at that and say, 'My loved one is in that building.' "

An uncle's visit hurts

Around age 12, on the cusp of adolescence, the dam broke for Tiffany. Vishnoo's only brother visited from Canada, and when he came through the door, she saw the spitting image of her father. That was the moment she realized he was never coming home. She cried and cried.

"It hurt me really badly," she says.

When Tiffany was 13, Charlie Gool came on the scene, a man her mother had been married to in Guyana before she met Vishnoo.

Tiffany says she rebelled, mouthing off. No one would replace her father.

An aunt intervened. "Don't you want your mom to be happy? Look at her."

In time, Tiffany says, she came to respect Charlie. She lectured her younger sisters to do the same.

At the big Sweet 16 party her mom threw for her, Charlie played stepdad. Tiffany appreciated the effort and let him walk her into the ballroom.

Lately, she's been having this recurring dream: Her father gets hit on the head and she sees him on the street. She tries to talk to him but he doesn't remember her.

"Who are you?" he says - and then she wakes up.