Oklahoma City Bombing

Late afternoons are the most poignant for Judy Kidwell.

That's when Kidwell, who works in the basement of the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City, often walks down the hall to the snack bar for a quiet cup of coffee.

Sitting there, Kidwell finds herself looking for friends in adjacent booths.

The young woman who brings a book to read. The two guys who always have the best jokes. The woman she compares notes with about kids.

Then the sadness comes. Kidwell knows she won't be seeing those faces ever again. All died in the April 19 bombing.

Kidwell was injured in the blast. At 9 a.m., she had walked across the street to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and was just inside the double doors on the first floor when the explosion occurred. Kidwell suffered a broken elbow and ankle, and some hearing loss.

She returned to work eight days later.

The emotional effects, Kidwell said, have been the biggest problem she's had to deal with.

"It's hard to explain to anyone not there how it felt. All your emotional security blankets were pulled away - that fast! " she said, snapping her fingers. "I don't know why I'm alive, and somebody 10 feet away from me died."

Marsha Kight has asked those "why" questions herself.

Frankie Ann Merrell, Kight's 23-year-old daughter, died in the bombing. A worker in the Federal Employees Credit Union, which was located in the Murrah Building, Merrell is survived by her husband, Charles, and 2-year-old daughter, Morgan, whom Kight now is helping to raise.

"Having my daughter die in a terrorist bombing is harder to accept than if she had been killed in an auto accident," Kight said. "My daughter's husband and I have good days and bad days, but weekends are the worst."

Mark and Joni Alderton initially did not question their good fortune after the bombing. Daughter Katie, then 20 months old, had been in the YMCA day-care center and received only minor cuts in the blast.

For the Aldertons, April 19 initially had started out lucky. Joni, who was pregnant, had given birth at 4 a.m. to a son. The baby was five weeks premature but appeared fine, doctors at Norman Regional Hospital assured the parents.

Mark, who was with his wife in Norman, had arranged for Katie and her sister, Sarah, 4, to be dropped off at their respective schools in Oklahoma City. He heard about the bombing in the hospital coffee shop.

On the television in Joni's room, the couple was horrified to see Katie's teacher being carried away with a big bloody gash in her head.

"We panicked," Joni Alderton said. "And it didn't help that a lot of TV coverage confused the Y day-care kids with the kids in the federal building day-care center."

When Norman officials told the distraught parents that all roads into the city were clogged, they started trying to get news about Katie by telephone. It did not help that neither parent knew what clothes their daughter had been wearing.

After nearly eight frantic hours of repeated phone calls to every hospital in Oklahoma City, the Red Cross and a host of other emergency agencies, the couple learned their little girl's whereabouts.

"Katie had quite a lot of blood on her clothes and in her hair, but most of the blood was not hers," said Mark. "She had this little smile frozen on her face. When we got to our house, she kissed the door, kissed the stairs, kissed the refrigerator and kissed her high chair. Then she cried all night."

Katie's OK, the Aldertons recalled thinking. They believed the worst part of their bombing ordeal was over.

But Katie's crying continued in the weeks afterward. She also had endless nightmares, wide mood swings and daymares.

"We called them little nervous breakdowns," Joni Alderton said. "She'd curl up in a fetal position and cover her head in the middle of the floor. She'd cry and cry, 'People hurt! Help!'"

During a family vacation in July, Katie began re-enacting the trauma, performing CPR on her teddy bear.

"If she heard a siren or saw a fire truck, she'd freak out," Joni Alderton said. "She was absolutely terrified."

Meanwhile, older sister Sarah had begun expressing qualms of her own. "Why did you put Katie in a school that blowed up?" she scolded her parents, over and over. She also had lurid nightmares and became fixated about death.

Joni and Mark Alderton began to doubt their parenting abilities. Each also had stored up guilt over not being there to protect Katie during the bombing.

"We had this perception that all the Y children were OK. The media and everybody said so," Joni Alderton said. "But we knew our kids were not OK, and we were not OK. So we must be these bad parents."

During a birthday party for another Y day-care center child in August, Joni Alderton learned other parents were having similar experiences.

That's when she called Project Heartland to arrange for her family to get counseling.

"It's been a safe haven, where we found out that what we were going through was normal for the situation," Joni Alderton said.

Soon afterward, at the Aldertons' urging, Project Heartland set up a support group for parents who had children in the YMCA Day Care Center.

But Joni Alderton still grapples with feelings of loss.

"A while back, when we took Katie over to the (bombing) site and the Y day care center, she said, 'Bye, bye, happy school,'" Alderton said. "It breaks my heart. Katie was the epitome of innocence, and we lost that that day."

Marsha Kight has been counting her losses too lately, and it makes her angry.

When she turned to Project Heartland as a refuge for her grief, she also found a focus for action. Kight has become an outspoken advocate for additional funds to pay for long-term counseling for bombing victims and their families.

Just before the Murrah Building implosion May 23, Judy Kidwell's emotional roller coaster hit bottom.

Although Kidwell had had nightmares and difficulty sleeping right from the beginning, she initially believed she was handling the stress. But her sleeping problems persisted, and she constantly felt exhausted. The grandmother of two also had bouts of uncontrolled crying and horrible flashbacks.

"I'd hear a loud noise or somebody yell, and there'd be an instant adrenaline rush, and then I wouldn't be able to stop crying," she said. "My family would say, 'You're OK.' But I thought I was going insane."

In despair, Kidwell called the American Red Cross. A counselor there put her in touch with Project Heartland Center.

"Sometimes, my mind would go down into this dark hole and brood a while," she said. "If it were not for Project Heartland and a crisis counselor at the Red Cross, I'd probably be a blithering idiot by now.

Judy Kidwell admits having occasional bouts of anger too.

"I feel that everyone of us who lived is a slap in the face to the guys who did it - those folks who wanted us all to die. I'm glad I lived so I can say, 'Take that!'" she said, punctuating her point with a swat on the tabletop.