Kansas City, Mo. ? The cleanup and recovery efforts at ground zero may be complete, but feelings of loss will linger for Missouri and Kansas families whose loved ones died in the World Trade Center attacks.

“The one thing I’m thankful for is I do have, I did have, a body. I at least had that closure,” said Tammy Drake, Lee’s Summit. Her husband, Randy, was struck by falling debris.

The remains of more than 1,700 other victims, however, have not been recovered or have not been identified.

Among them is Bill Caspar, 57, who grew up near Junction City, Kan.

“I imagine this will probably go on the rest of my life. It’s always there, and you just have to work past it,” said his brother Charles Caspar Jr., who still lives on the family farm in Geary County, Kan. “It’s hard to lose your brother.”

The Caspar family buried a lock of Charles’ hair they found in his New Jersey apartment, along with a wooden urn of debris and ashes from the World Trade Center site.

In southwest Missouri, Lucille Willett thinks every day of her son, John, who grew up in Independence and earned a master’s degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

“We still have his belongings, his pictures and stuff we’d never get rid of,” said the Walnut Shade resident. “Everything that was John is still here.”

She and her husband, Ron, are trying to get on with their lives the best they can. But “it will never be over for us as long as we live,” she said.

The pain of losing John has been magnified for his father because there are no remains to bury.

“I don’t know how to explain that void,” Ron Willett said. “I talked to him Monday night (Sept. 10) on the telephone. The next day, he vanished from the face of the Earth. Nothing. That has an impact.”

Tammy Drake doesn’t pay much attention to news coverage of the attacks these days.

“I don’t turn on the TV much. When they talk about it, it brings it back to the surface. It makes it harder to get through the day,” she said.

Randy Drake, 37, had commuted each week to his job as a network manager for Siemens in New York. He was in a hospital until he died Sept. 22.

“I’ve had to learn to get along without the best part of me,” Tammy Drake said, pausing to choke back tears.