KLAHOMA CITY -- Sooner than we expect, after the digging and the funerals but before the cleanup, New York will face the business of organized remembering. We will try to figure out not just how to use that precious and haunted real estate at the southern end of Manhattan, but what, officially, to tell ourselves and our children and their children about what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

There was a time when civic remembrance was a slow-gathering affair. It took more than 30 years to make a military park at Gettysburg, and about 20 to dedicate a memorial at Pearl Harbor. These days, we grab for history. Here in Oklahoma City, the place Americans last talked of "ground zero," a committee was busy with the question of a proper memorial less than three months after Timothy McVeigh ignited his Ryder truck full of fertilizer and fuel oil outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building on April 19, 1995.

Oklahoma City rushed into it, as New Yorkers almost certainly will, as a form of healing. Memorializing was something for the survivors to do that seemed important at a time when their lives felt sucked empty of meaning.

New Yorkers may resist the idea they need instruction from the provinces on the subject of therapy. Trust me, we can use what they know.

The first thing Oklahomans learned was how quickly the pain that unified them during the initial euphoria of rescue and bereavement began to pull them apart. Meetings of survivors devolved into quarrels over whose suffering deserved pride of place in the memorial.

"Those early meetings, there was so much anger," recalls Doris Jones, whose pregnant daughter was crushed in the bombing. "You had family members fighting with survivors over who was the more hurt: `You can't be hurting as much as I'm hurting. Nobody died.' "

Edward T. Linenthal, a scholar of memorials who has spent years studying Oklahoma City, says divorced families fought over which of a dead child's toys to put in the museum. Relatives of adult victims seethed at the sympathy lavished on the children killed in the blast. Doris Jones came to meetings for the sole purpose of demanding that her unborn grandson be added to the official list of 168 dead. (He was not, although he and two other unborn victims are included in the memorial.)

Among the survivors and rescue workers there were suicides, divorces, retreats into drugs and alcohol.

"These things bring communities together, and they take them apart," Professor Linenthal says. How much more fractious will the process be in New York, where the population of victims is immeasurably greater and more diverse and the culture is less patient?

In Oklahoma City civic leaders gently led an unwieldy memorial committee of 350 people through months of raw emotion and recrimination, and the fractured city came together in a remarkable consensus. The result on the ground is a triumph of visceral remembrance ・the perfect lawn furnished with 168 empty, straight-backed chairs; the museum, just opened in February, filled with the stories of ordinary lives cut short, the rueful relics of lost children. It is simple and harrowing, and not at all diminished by being suddenly overshadowed.

In their emphasis on making the memorial an instrument of therapy, however, Oklahomans have so far done less well at the second professed purpose of their memorial, to teach us something useful about terrorism.

Only one cursory display deals with the place of Oklahoma City in a world endangered by lethal hatreds ・a map of terrorist incidents around the world from 1985 to 1995, now grotesquely out of date.

Timothy McVeigh, the decorated gulf war veteran who styled himself a warrior against a malignant federal government, is scarcely acknowledged in this memorial to the lives he destroyed. He looks down from a few framed newspaper pages.

O.K., perhaps you would not expect to find "American Terrorist," the best-selling journalistic biography of the killer, in the museum gift shop alongside the plush comfort toys and the inspirational mementos, but he is a glaring absence in a place that has declared a mission of educating.

Robert M. Johnson, the attorney who presided over the memorial meetings, said some survivors feared glamorizing Mr. McVeigh and his accomplices, or worried the museum would become a rallying point for anti-government militias. Others who sat through the process told me Oklahomans were uncomfortable reckoning with a killer whose roots were in America, whose proclaimed motives were perversions of healthy American values.

James E. Young, a leading expert on Holocaust memorials, says that monuments to national trauma usually contain "an element of self-congratulation," a sanctification of the nation's purpose. The museum here revels in the word "heartland" and in the values of patriotism, civic generosity, family and faith.

Oklahomans have so far shown little inclination to explore whether Mr. McVeigh represented a sick underside of those values. There is nothing in the museum about the violent ultra-patriot militias or about apocalyptic Christian extremists, or other indigenous hate sects. Probably it would be too much to expect that Oklahomans, whose state is still home each year to the world's largest gun bazaar and where gun freedoms are held sacrosanct, would have focused attention on the gun- show milieu where Mr. McVeigh incubated his twisted politics.

Instead, Oklahoma City has chosen to regard the bombing not as a political act but as an inexplicable, demented crime. "We don't want to comprehend it," Kari F. Watkins, the executive director of the memorial, told me. "That implies acceptance. This is unfathomable."

In fairness, many American memorials ・including those directed not by the angry bereaved but by presumably more dispassionate historians ・still manage to fail as history. James W. Loewin's book, "Lies Across America," is a catalog of historic sites distorted by bias or boosterism. We have no national monuments to slavery or the decimation of American natives. Memorials, like most history, are made by the victors.

The most truthful memorials err on the side of ambivalence, at the risk of controversy ・Maya Lin's stirring anti-memorial to the Vietnam War, for example, or Berlin's new, self- probing Holocaust museum.

I wonder if New York will do any better than Oklahoma City in memorializing our new tragedy. We have one seeming advantage over Oklahoma City, an enemy that did not grow from our midst, although there is the discomfiting matter of our early military aid to the Afghan "freedom fighters," as President Reagan called them, in whose ranks Osama bin Laden first tasted combat.

How will a New York memorial, undertaken in search of solace, confront the men who instigated our suffering? Will it portray the jihad cultists simply as barbarians arrayed against our liberal values, as President Bush did Thursday night in the cause of national mobilization, or will we allow for some complexity in the portrait, some examination of how the world could have bred people so violently disaffected?

Kenneth E. Foote, a cultural geologist who has spent years studying the aftermath of mass murders, says the overpowering impulse of the victims is to efface all memory of the killers. The homes where the serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy committed their horrors, for example, were destroyed at the insistence of victims' families.

"There's always a real tension between remembering and forgetting at these sites," he said.

Forgetting, it seems, is more than denial. It is a kind of vengeance. One of the final exhibits in the Oklahoma City museum describes the only time the survivors have turned their collective passion to a political cause. They helped push a bill through Congress that shortens the appeals process for federal death row inmates, and hastens their executions.

I asked Doris Jones, who was part of that effort and who was also an outspoken advocate of executing Mr. McVeigh, whether his death in June had brought the much-promised closure.

"No," she said. "There is no closure. But that's not what I wanted. If you could have put him in a prison, completely incommunicado, cut off from the world the way my daughter was cut off, I'd have settled for that. It wasn't that I wanted him dead. I wanted him to be silent. That's all I wanted."