When Barbara Williams’ husband dropped her off at her Oklahoma City workplace the morning of April 19, 1995, it was like any other day. Just the usual morning routine. No indicators terror might strike. Or that this was the last chance she’d have to kiss him goodbye.

“It was just a normal day,” Williams said. “I remember watching him, I don’t know why ... because usually I’d just get out of the car and go into the building, but I watched him drive around and make the U-turn to go back out ... and he’d already had the radio turned back up.”

Her husband of 23 years, Steve Williams, 42, continued on his way to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, where he worked for the government as an operational supervisor.

At 9:02 a.m., Williams felt a shocking jolt in her building.

“Even at 50 Penn Place it was like, you could feel it was like a big jolt,” she said. “Then somebody came in my office and said something happened with the federal building.”

Within minutes, Williams saw the horrifying television images of the torn-apart building. Fearing for her husband’s safety, she started calling his work. But the phone lines, she said, were already dead.

It wasn’t long before Williams and her three daughters were informed Steve was reported missing. Allysone Williams Moore, an 18-year-old high school senior at the time, was pulled out of class into the principal’s office that morning along with her 15-year-old freshman sister, Meryl Williams Esser.

“More details came in, and at one point they thought it was a different building. We got confirmation that it was the Murrah Building ... that’s when it became very real and very scary,” Moore said. “So my aunt came up to school and picked us up and took us back to her house.”

Sara Williams Sweet, Williams’ oldest daughter, a 22-year-old senior at Oklahoma State University at the time, also was in class when the bomb went off. She heard a rumor about an explosion from a classmate, but didn’t think much of it at first. But by the time she returned to her sorority house, she knew something had gone terribly wrong.

“I got about halfway up the driveway and someone came out and said, ‘You have a call on the house phone,’ and that’s when I knew that something had gone wrong, because no one ever used the house phone,” Sweet said. “It was the campus police who were calling me.”

Sweet left OSU and returned to her hometown of Cashion where she stayed glued to the television at her aunt and uncle’s house with her two sisters.

Williams spent the day going to several hospitals in the hope of finding her husband, before returning home to be with her daughters.

The family waited 12 days before hearing the unthinkable. The husband and father of three was found dead in the building’s rubble.

“I just never really thought that it would be my dad,” Sweet said. “When [my mom] told us, I knew what she was going to say before she said it, but it still didn’t click in till she said it.”

Williams, Esser and Moore said they found it difficult to hope for Steve’s return after a few days.

“It was hard to even do anything really, just waiting for the phone call and not wanting to give up hope, because you just kept hearing there was a possibility that somebody might still be alive, but then after that many days you start to realize that’s pretty far-fetched,” Williams said.

Sweet said although the 12 days were by far the worst of her life, she could not fully believe she wouldn’t see her father again.

“Maybe I just never consciously thought he could be dead, or maybe I just didn’t want to believe it, but I just didn’t really believe it until my mom came back and told us for sure,” Sweet said.

After Steve’s funeral, though, the grieving family had to face what they said was the hardest part: Going on with life.

“We had a really nice service,” Williams said. “And then it was just like, you always hear that when that part’s over, everybody has lives. I knew all that in my head, but it was just so emotional at that time.”

Sweet studied in Europe that summer and headed back to finish her last year at OSU in the fall, while Moore began her freshman year in Stillwater.

Williams said she and Esser said stayed only one more year in their Cashion home before moving to Oklahoma City in 1996. She said the memories of her husband in the house were especially difficult.

Steve’s daughters all had a good relationship with their father, they said.

“I would probably spend more time talking to my mom, but my dad was always the one when I got my ACT scores or did well in a class or something, he was always the one I would call,” Sweet said.

Sweet said her father always made time for his family.

“He was proud of his job and everything, but it’s not like he was someone who worked 80 hours a week,” Sweet said. “He was very good at leaving work at the office and just being with us.”

Sweet said she and her sisters dealt with the loss differently, as each was in a different stage of life at the time. Sweet said she was the most outwardly emotional, while Moore said she held many of her emotions in at first, trying to be strong for her mother.

“I didn’t want her to be upset, I didn’t want her to be sad, so I kind of took on that role,” Moore said.

Esser said she almost did not know how to handle it at first.

“My mom was concerned about me because I didn’t cry, but I think it’s just because it’s kind of hard for a 15-year-old to grasp at that time,” Esser said. “I wasn’t showing any emotion because it was just kind of overwhelming.”

But perhaps the most difficult part to grasp was how the family lost its husband and father, Sweet said.

Sweet and her mother attended Timothy McVeigh’s 1997 trial in Colorado, where they met McVeigh’s father. Sweet said the experience provided her with some of the closure she needed.

“It was just so eye-opening meeting him, because he was just like, ‘I hate what happened to you all, I’m so sorry,’” Sweet said. “I kind of forced myself to see him as this man’s son so I could let go of some my anger and hatred that I was hanging onto, and it definitely helped.”

But even after gaining some closure, some things in life never really get easier, Sweet said.

“I got married, and it’s just like, every big moment is kind of bittersweet,” she said. “There was just an element that was missing, and then I had my children, and I just think about that the only way they’ll ever know my dad is through stories and pictures, and just how much fun he would have had with my kids.”

Moore said she found high school graduation one of her hardest milestones without her father, especially because she graduated about a month after his death.

“It’s just all of those things that should have been so much fun. It just put a cloud over them in a way,” Moore said.

College, Moore said, was an especially difficult sorting-out period.

“I started in August, and the whole college experience was just very weird for me. I was kind of damaged, and so I just didn’t have enough time to kind of figure things out,” Moore said.

Fifteen years have passed, but it’s been a long journey, Williams said.

“It gets easier, but it’s just a tough time of the year,” she said. “It’s just all the prettiness in the world, and then this ugly part. And it just reminds me of garden weather. It’s just the whole thing. You think after 15 years, it’s gotten easier, but it’s still sad.”

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