Oklahoma City Memorial

I took sort of an unexpected trip this week, to a place I had never been before.  I only wish it had been for a better reason.  My mom's sister died, and my brother and I, along with Cooper and my niece, accompanied my mom to Oklahoma City for her funeral.
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While we were there we visited the memorial site for the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, bombed by terrorist Timothy McVeigh on April 19, 1995.  It was a very moving experience. 
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This is the group of my family members who went with me.

There were two gates, one at each end of the site, with a reflective pool between them, where the building once stood.  The gate at one end is labeled 9:01, representing the minute just before the bombing and the innocence that America still had at that time.  The other gate is labeled 9:03, the minute after the bombing, when America's healing began.

There are chairs representing each of the 168 victims who was killed, arranged in rows by the floors of the building they were on, plus a few others for people who were killed outside of the building.  The smaller chairs represent children. 

A few represented both -- women who were pregnant at the time they were killed.

A piece of the old building that still stands holds plaques with the names of those in the building who survived the bombing.

Besides the victims and the survivors, a third group of people was also affected by the tragedy: all of us.  The reflective pool represents that group, as we can stand over it and look in and see ourselves.

Here is my niece Abbie standing in front of the Survivor's tree, which was in the parking lot of the building.  It caught fire at the time of the bombing, but lived, and now shades a section of the memorial.

An outer wall of a museum across the street (which we didn't go in) displays a saying written by one of the rescue workers just after the bombing.

Many children around the country were deeply affected by the tragedy.  These tiles in the children's area were painted by some of them. 

There are also some chalkboards for visiting children to write messages, as Abbie is doing here.

This fence is part of the original fence constructed around the building after the bombing.  People began placing tokens on it as soon as it was put up and continue to do so.  They are periodically removed and preserved in archives.

This is a beautiful memorial representing a tragedy which probably affected all of us who are old enough to remember it.  If you ever have a chance, I would encourage you to visit it.
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This blog is dedicated to the memory of my Aunt Gloria, 1931-2012.