OKLAHOMA CITY ? They can rattle off the facts of their parents’ deaths with ease.

What they can’t easily distill into words is how losing a parent in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building shook them to the core.

Timothy McVeigh’s Ryder truck filled with explosives tore into the federal building on April 19, 1995, leaving 30 children without parents and 219 people with at least one parent dead.

The forlorn faces of young children struggling to understand the tragedy that gripped the nation a decade ago. Thousands of dollars poured into scholarship trust funds set up for children.

Vivacious and conscientious, 20-year-old Brittany Miller benefited from the nation’s generosity. The trust funds are paying for Miller’s expenses at the University of Oklahoma, where the sophomore is pursuing a degree in a medical field.

Miller was 10 years old the day her mother, a loan officer at the Federal Employees Credit Union, was killed by the bomb.

Eighteen out of 23 credit union employees were killed in the blast. The day started normal enough, a child asking her mother to fix her hair, the last thing Karan Shepherd would do for her daughter.

“That’s the last time that I saw her. It was hard to go back there and see the brush still sitting there and hear the messages of people who had been trying to call her that day.”

Miller is one of 135 people who have used money from the Survivors Education Fund, the credit union’s scholarship and the Heartland Scholarship Fund to pursue four-year college degrees or technical certifications. Sixteen people who lost parents in the bombing have gone on to earn master’s degrees. Two have earned law degrees and one has a veterinary medicine degree, according to numbers compiled by the Oklahoma City Community Foundation.

Yet their accomplishments can be reminders of what’s missing in their lives, said Dr. Bruce Perry, a child psychiatrist in Houston.

“It’s really a huge challenge for these kids,” said Perry. “At every developmental stage, they have to relive this event to understand it. Your brain kind of has to reinterpret things as it matures. It might be the day they get married or graduate from college; that’s the kind of personal little landmark people set up.”

For Miller, it was her 20th birthday: “I realized that I had lived the same years without her as I had with her, and that was kind of hard.”

Ken Thompson, 40, spends his days educating people about the terrorism that killed his mother, Virginia Thompson, as the director of external relations for the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism.

“I don’t think closure ever happens,” Thompson said. “People learn to live with the loss. They feel like they’ve been defined by an explosion or an attack. I don’t want to be defined by that, it just becomes a fabric of who I am.”

Kimberly McKinney and Rhonda Hill raised their baby brother hoping to make their parents proud.

Their mother died of heart failure in 1988. Their father, Ronald Vernon Harding, a claims representative for the Social Security Administration, died in the explosion.

At that moment, Hill, then 28, became the sole guardian of her 8-year brother and a mother figure to McKinney, who was 26 at the time of the bombing.

“Sometimes I just had to tell her, ‘I can’t deal with this,'” said Hill, now a pharmacy auditor for the Oklahoma Health Care Authority.

The women lived together for several years, raising their brother, Todrick, who is now an 18-year-old freshman at Langston University studying criminal justice.

For them the memories of their mother’s touch or their father’s musical talents are vivid. For Todrick it’s less tangible.

“There are days when he gets upset and says he doesn’t have a mom and a dad and nobody loves him,” McKinney said. “Sometimes I pat him on the back. But other times, we’re like, ‘We don’t either. We’re all in this together.'”