Memories Gathered for 2 Missing Victims : Bombing: Their bodies still lie in the rubble of the Oklahoma City building. Memorial services give families and friends a chance to say goodby.

Choking back sobs and doubts, they tried to say goodby on Monday--to a soul, if not to a body.

By the hundreds, family and friends packed two separate churches for a final tribute to Virginia Thompson and Christy Rosas, both employees of the bomb-shattered credit union that plunged from the third floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

The ministers at each service spoke of hope and faith, of lives lived righteously and spirits reborn. Portraits of the women, both smiling in a beatific light, graced each altar. Between every wooden pew, hands were held and heads were bowed.

But unlike the other 165 victims of America’s worst terrorist attack, neither Thompson, 56, nor Rosas, 22, could be blessed with a funeral. There was no hearse. There was no coffin. There was nothing to bury, except for the grisly image of their bodies still missing in a crypt of rubble.

“This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life,” said Lena Schweitzer, 25, a friend of the Thompson family, as a bell tolled outside the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in the suburban community of El Reno. “There’s no finality. I mean, she’s gone and we know that. But we can’t really say goodby.”

Entombed now for 21 days under a pile of concrete too precarious to probe, Thompson and Rosas symbolize all that is unresolved about the April 19 disaster--the fears, the questions, the hurt.

Some mourners tried not to dwell on the circumstances of each woman’s death, focusing instead on the loving person whom they remembered, not her physical remains.

“It doesn’t make too much difference where her body is,” said Lavon Van Buskirk, a childhood friend of Thompson, recalling a cherished photo of them riding horses together as young girls. “If they had found her, she would have just been put in the ground again.”

But others feared that something was missing, a sense of closure and resolution. Until the bodies are recovered, they said, there will be no healing, no relief.

“It’s not over,” said Sarah Wilkins, who graduated with Thompson from El Reno High School in 1955. “The thought of just leaving her there, that is horrible, just horrible.”

Ever since they called off the search late last week, authorities have said they eventually will make an effort to extricate the two bodies. But they cannot do that until they decide what to do with the building itself, an emotional question that has sparked much debate here in recent days.

Whether or not the structure is rebuilt, officials say, the gutted ruins are so unstable that they will almost surely have to be razed. The safest and most probable approach, according to Gov. Frank Keating’s office, would be to detonate the remaining structural supports--meaning that Thompson and Rosas, if only in death, would have to endure one last explosion.

“We thought it couldn’t get any worse,” said the Rev. Ross Craig, who officiated at the service for Rosas at Southern Hills Baptist Church, as he described the 2 1/2 weeks of waiting for her name to surface on the list of recovered bodies. “It hurts so bad.”

Thompson, who spent 25 years at the Rock Island Credit Union before joining the Federal Employees Credit Union in January, has three grown children, who hope to establish a scholarship fund in her memory. Rosas, the mother of a 5-year-old boy, had only started her receptionist’s job a week before the bombing.