For Judy Powley, like most Oklahomans, it’s time to move on.
Two years have passed since 168 lives were lost and countless others seared by the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, the worst terrorist act ever committed on American soil.
Since then, plaques have been mounted, remembrance gardens planted and a memorial center planned.
Flowers now fade on victims’ gravesites as the freshness of grief slowly ebbs. And day by day the downtown district devastated by the blast is being rebuilt, as are the lives of those closest to the tragedy. Some will take longer than others.
Standing behind the counter of the Regency Store, a deli across from the bomb site, Powley, 54, looked out at the still-ravaged neighborhood and said softly, “It’s time for people to get on with their lives. They can’t stay like this forever. Keep on truckin.’ That’s what you got to do.”
Powley, who keeps a blue-vinyl scrapbook of the bombing under the counter, knew many of those killed or injured. She knows she might have been among them had she not been scheduled to work an afternoon shift on April 19, 1995. When the bomb went off at 9:02 a.m., it rattled the dishes in her kitchen 13 miles away.
For Jannie Coverdale, working only two blocks away from the Murrah building that morning, the bomb wrenched any sense of normalcy from her life. Guardian of her grandsons, 2-year-old Elijah and 5-year-old Aaron, Coverdale had left the boys at the federal building day-care center 90 minutes before the bombing. Their shattered bodies were found four days later.
“Our wounds are very much still open,” said Coverdale, a youthful woman of 59, who wears a watch decorated with two black cherubs and carries a key chain engraved with the boys’ names.
“The people who are not directly affected are ready to go on with their lives, and that’s what they want us to do. We can’t. Eventually, we’ll have to build new lives, but we don’t know how yet,” she said, her eyes glistening.
Paul Judkins, 65, can understand both points of view. Mowing the dusty grass around the cedars and gravestones at 100-year-old Kolb Cemetery in nearby Spencer, Judkins knows intimately the cycles of bereavement.
A red cap pulled low over his sun-creased face, Judkins knelt to make some order out of the windblown pile of withered flowers and weathered teddy bears strewn on the grave of Baylee Almon.
Baylee, killed the day after her first birthday, was one of the children in the federal building’s day-care center when the bomb exploded. She remains one of the best-known victims because of a widely published photograph of her limp, tiny body being carried out of the rubble in the arms of firefighter Chris Fields.
After the first anniversary of the bombing last year, Fields and his fellow Oklahoma City firefighters stopped giving further interviews by order of Fire Chief Gary Marrs.
Enough is enough, as far as Marrs is concerned. “I think Oklahomans felt that way a long time ago,” he said. “The comments I get, from not only neighbors but citizens’ groups, are, `We need to get on with this,’ all the way up to, `I’m sick of hearing about it.’ “
Referring to the news media in particular, he said, “People keep saying, `We want to come back to help you get closure.’ I’m just saying that my department put closure on it last year on April 19th. . . . I think the only thing that keeps stirring it up is the people who want to talk about closure.”
But Judkins believes it’s not as simple as that. Tenderly fingering a bunny-shaped wind chime that someone from Alabama recently hung at Baylee’s grave, he predicted there would be more such items in the days to come. Although Judkins believes the time has come for people to stop dwelling on the tragedy, he knows many are not over it yet.
“Heavens, no,” he said. “They should be, but they’re not. The anniversary and the trial, it’s stirred them all up again,” he said. He referred to the opening of the trial of bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh in Denver on March 31. Oklahomans can see the trial on closed-circuit TV here at the Federal Aviation Administration’s auditorium.
Bob Johnson, an attorney and chairman of the Oklahoma City Memorial Foundation charged with building a permanent memorial at the bomb site, agreed with Judkins’ assessment. “Those most directly affected are healing at different rates and, with the trial commencing, that process is probably going to be reversed,” he said.
As for closure, he said, it depends on how it is defined. “If it means being the way we were before the bombing, we’ll never reach closure. I think we’re all changed. We lost our innocence, if you will, and our sense of security forever. Having said that, however, I think for the majority of people, they haven’t forgotten, but they’ve moved forward with their lives.”
If numbers are any measure, the counselors at Project Heartland, a mental health service created to respond to the tragedy, saw only 95 clients in March, compared with 2,474 during April 1996.
The inherent stress in this emotional tug-of-war between going forward and looking back initially led the city to refrain from planning any special events for the second anniversary, said Mayor Ron Norick.
As the anniversary date approached, however, families of victims and survivors expressed interest in a low-key civic remembrance ceremony, he said. Such a service, to be held at the bomb site Saturday morning, will include an observation of 168 seconds of silence for the victims, presentation of the colors and a wreath from President Clinton, a reading of the victims’ names and an address by Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating.
The theme: A time to look forward.
Over the years, as the pain eases and the event passes into the history books, remembrances at the bomb site will be conducted more privately than publicly, Norick speculated.
“I’m sure there will always be something that will happen on the 19th of April. Whether it’s one family going down there or one thousand, only time will tell.”
On July 3, the city will announce the winner of an international competition to design the memorial and education center to be built on the three-acre site. Eventually, there also will be a Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism and Violence endowed with five permanent chairs, said Johnson. the memorial chairman.
But for now, thousands of people, many from far away, continue to come to the empty, blocklong grassy swath at Robinson Avenue and 5th Street where the Murrah building once stood. Some hang baseball caps, wreaths and other mementos on the wire fence. Others, like visiting Californian Dale McMann, just stare at the seemingly small space that spawned such great suffering.
“There’s still so much here, even though the building’s gone and time has passed,” said McMann, 34. “The sad thing is, the only person who’s going to be remembered is the guy who did it.”
Not if Jannie Coverdale has her way. “I don’t intend to let people forget. The minute we forget, let our guards down, it will happen again,” said Coverdale, who, like many family members of victims, plans to attend and testify at the trial in Denver.
Coverdale, who hasn’t worked since the explosion, hopes that the trial will answer the many questions she still has about the bombing, such as who was involved and whether the government had any warning. “That’s what I need to know in order to start building a new life,” she said.
For others, that new life already has begun, as naturally and inevitably as the spring is greening this rawboned state.
St. Joseph’s Cathedral, badly battered by the blast, is putting the finishing touches on its restoration. Baylee Almon’s mother, Aren, is restarting her life with a new husband. And hundreds of local schoolchildren will commemorate the bombing not with tears but with laughter during the first annual Oklahoma City 24-Hour Relay Challenge, a day of races and entertainment to raise money for after-school activities and violence prevention.
Said Chester Phyffer, one of the organizers of the event, “This is just a chance to say that there is community that comes out of the dust of the destruction in Oklahoma City.”
Even for Jannie Coverdale, something is different this year. “A year ago I told a reporter I believed I would never smile again,” she said, smiling at herself.
