On Nov. 19, 2001, Susan Ainbinder Hutchins received a call saying that her son, Kevin Colbert, who worked at an investment bank on the 89th floor of 2 World Trade Center, had been identified among the ground zero remains.

“I’m thinking, they found my son,” she said, “but the funeral director had a real hard time making eye contact with me. He said, ‘Susan, I don’t know what they told you on the telephone, but we only have his thighbone from his right leg.’ ”

To spare his friends and relatives the shock, Ms. Ainbinder Hutchins executed a plan to make everyone believe he was buried whole. But the nightmare was not over. “The calls kept coming and coming and coming,” she said. For several years, at roughly two-month intervals, she was informed that another piece of her son had been identified.