I was too young to fully understand what happened when the bomb went off. I was old enough to know that something was wrong, that people were hurt, and that my parents were scared.

I have a few scattered memories of my early childhood—stealing blueberries from my grandmother's home in the Arkansas mountains, seeing a deer and her fawns in our backyard before the fence was put up—but the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City stands out as one of my most vivid memories.

I remember being home from school (I grew up in Oklahoma City) and that I was sick. My dad stayed with me while I laid on the couch eating crackers and soup. We felt the ground shake, which was unusual at the time for Oklahoma, and my dad turned on the television to find out what happened. He turned it off not long after and told me that he was going to his room to watch. That was unusual—the TV in my parents' bedroom was old and small, so my dad almost always watched programs in the living room. Thinking he didn't want to disturb me if I fell asleep, I shut my eyes and drifted off.

As it turns out, my father didn't want to disturb me in another way. Images of the bombing, of panic, of crying and rubble filled the screen, and my dad didn't want me to see or hear them. He couldn't protect me from the bombing's impact in my life, however. My mom, an elementary school teacher, came home in tears. She and her students had been on a bus that morning, on their way to a field trip in downtown Oklahoma City. They had also felt the ground shake, and as they kept driving, they ran into a roadblock. Their bus was asked to turn around and go back to the school, but not before they were close enough to see what had happened.

Mom was too shaken up to make dinner. My dad suggested that he go pick something up instead of cooking. At that point, mom became hysterical. She refused to let him leave. We didn't know who the bombers were, if there were going to be more, what was going on. Everyone was afraid that the Murrah Building was only the first attack. So my dad stayed home instead, and we all ate crackers and soup.

As with all large-scale traumas, the bombing in Oklahoma City has had a communal impact as well as an individual one. As Edward Linenthal describes, "The bombing not only imprinted itself on the minds and bodies of those immediately affected but it also became a powerful symbolic presence in the American cultural landscape" (2). The world turned its eyes to us and saw us hurt, saw us broken, saw us in pain. But it also saw us at our best. We helped each other, opened our doors to strangers, and supported each other as much as we could. We began healing even as the pain was still there, as the wound was still open.

The bombing was a community event. It shaped Oklahoma City; as Linenthal describes, “victimized and defined by environmental disaster, the bombing became central to the city’s identity" (82). It gave us new ways of relating to each other, as only those who share a communal trauma can. We cannot talk about Oklahoma City without talking about the bombing, even 20 years later, even when Oklahoma City has so much more than the rubble and a memorial of an attack. But the bombing is Oklahoma City. It is our image; it is our symbol. In its pain—but also in its resiliency—it is Oklahoma City.

Nothing better demonstrates this than the ways that the city has rebuilt itself through—not from—the bombing. The memorial, our main tourist attraction as well as our main space of healing, stands on Ground Zero, telling of the history of that spot and showing spaces of survival. The areas around that memorial are filled with new attractions and commercial enterprises, none of which would be there without the bombing. In 2008, the OKC Thunder NBA team relocated to our city, and they play down the street from the memorial. But they were also brought to Oklahoma City with the help of Sam Presti (now general manager), who also sits on the memorial board. Those involved in the memorial, hurt and shaped by the bombing, have contributed to the renewal of the city, and so the city has grown through the bombing, never forgetting that history but instead embracing it and writing it into all our other spaces.