MCVEIGH TRIAL STIRS VICTIMS' EMOTIONS : SOME SEE `CLOSURE,' OTHERS MORE GRIEF.

Byline: Sam Howe Verhovek The New York Times

Martin Cash needs to get into the Denver courtroom. ``I'll look right at McVeigh with my one eye,'' said Cash, whose other eye was blown out of its socket on April 19, 1995. ``I'm going to let him know I'm there.''

Florence Rogers does not want to follow the trial. ``Why put yourself through that day after day after day when you've been through hell already?'' asked Rogers, president of the Federal Employees Credit Union here and the one survivor among nine women who were together in her office, preparing an audit, when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was blown up.

Judy Walker also sees little point in following the trial. She has plans to visit her family in Alabama and Virginia. ``Going to Denver is not going to bring Bob back,'' said Walker, speaking of her husband, who was killed by the bomb. ``Going to see the kids and the grandchildren will.''

But for Dot Hill, who survived only because she had walked down the hall for a cup of coffee, the trial represents an important way to come to terms with an incident that killed several close friends. ``I think it's the only step I can realize to try to get close to a why,'' Hill, a purchasing agent for the General Services Administration, said. ``Maybe I can get something out of it, even if it's half a why or an unacceptable why. There's still an answer somewhere.''

She added that she very much wanted to go Denver to look at Timothy McVeigh, one of the two defendants who has been charged in the case. ``I just need to be close, in that room, to see him with my own eyes and try to read him,'' Hill said. ``After all, they're saying he tried to kill me.''

Her comment caused another survivor, Susan Hunt, to shudder. ``To be in the same room with him?'' she asked. ``My God. That is about the worst thing I could imagine.''

Dilemma for all

Two years after the bombing that killed 168 people, the trial of McVeigh, the first defendant to go to trial, presents a dilemma for the survivors and for friends and family members of the victims. Does the proceeding offer some opportunity for catharsis - a striking number of people here use ``closure'' to describe what they might get out of following the trial - or will it just be a continuing reminder of the tragedy, prolonging the grief?

``This is something that many, many people are struggling with right now,'' said Dr. Paul Heath, a psychologist for the Department of Veterans Affairs and a bombing survivor who is president of the OK City Murrah Building Survivors Association.

``A lot of people don't want to invest the psychic energy needed to relive the whole thing,'' Heath said. ``So they're trying to avoid the trial altogether. Other people have this need to wade right into the middle of it, hoping they will catch a glimmer of information they had not caught before so that it will finally make sense to them. And still others, whether they want to follow it or not, feel that this story needs to be told over and over and over again, so that, maybe, it will never happen again.''

The decision about whether or how closely to follow the trial, which is in the jury-selection phase, is complicated by the available options, traveling to Denver either through a lottery for a government-paid trip or by paying one's own way, watching a closed-circuit television feed here or simply following news reports.

That decision is part of an even broader predicament over memorializing the bombing.

Many reminders

There are reminders throughout downtown, including road signs directing traffic to the bombing site, which itself has become a tourist destination. Thousands of objects are hung on a chain-link fence around the area where the building stood, including pictures, poems, photographs, a hubcap and a Green Bay Packers pillowcase signed by visitors from Wisconsin.

On Saturday, the second anniversary of the bombing, the city had planned to announce three to five finalists for the design of an $8.8 million memorial center to be built on the two-block site of the blast.

At nearly every office where a government agency once housed in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building has been relocated, there is a memorial to workers killed in the bombing, and at least some employees have said the daily reminders make it all the harder to move through recovery.

``This is a very hard issue, because it varies so much by individual,'' said Gwen Allen, project director of Project Heartland, a federally financed state-operated program that gives free counseling to anyone affected by the bombing. ``For some people, there could never be enough memorials. For others, one is too many.

``There is no question that the grieving process is prolonged here. With other tragedies, say in a car crash, there's the grief, there's the funeral, there's an obituary in the newspaper. But after awhile there are not these daily reminders of what actually happened. Here, there's always a trigger, whether it's a billboard, an article in the newspaper, a blue ribbon tied to someone's gate. I'm not saying that this is good or bad. But it does prolong the grieving and recovery process.''

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Photo

Photo: Billy Cleveland holds his grandson, Marshall Riley Young, whose aunt died in the 1995 bombing.

Associated Press