TAMPA - The healing has come slowly for the families and loved ones affected by Hank Earl Carr's violence.

His yard shoes wait by the door. His ash tray sits near his chair. In the beginning, she stared at the wall, craving physical pain to numb the emotional pain.

``I've had to learn to put my grief and my emotions into a little room in the back of my mind,'' says Vickie Childers, widow to slain Tampa Detective Rick Childers.

``When I get up in the morning and go to work, I close that door.''

She lost her soul mate the day Hank Earl Carr turned his venom loose on decent people and killed his girlfriend's son and three cops.

Strangers took note, then became distracted - Mark McGuire broke a home run record; John Glenn returned to space; the president survived impeachment.

Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter passed. So did the birthdays of three fallen heroes, and for their families, nothing is over.

``This is not what I planned with Brad. I'm supposed to be pregnant now,'' says Nadine La Monte, 26, who was engaged to marry Trooper James Bradford Crooks last November.

The two detectives left wives and ex-wives and children, by blood and marriage, some young, some grown, all torn.

``There was the hurt and the sadness at first, and then the anger,'' says Detective Randy Bell's ex-wife, Carolyn Bell, mother to his two youngest daughters, including 15-year-old Ashley.

``As the time's gone on, Ashley's gotten angrier. The anger has been directed, because Hank Carr isn't here any more, at Bernice Bowen.''

Survivors expect to see each other next week at the trial of Bowen, Carr's girlfriend.

They've bolstered each other through May memorial services, well-intentioned observances that nonetheless freshen wounds. There's been little chance to heal.

At Christmas, widow Donna Bell didn't put up her traditional ornaments on advice from a support group.

But no one warned her about the Colorado school shootings.

``Somehow, I'm very sensitive, very open to the hurt,'' she says. ``I must have cried for hours. It was like, `How can this keep happening?' Guns, guns, guns.

``I know it's a mean, ugly world and we have to look for the beauty. But you have to go through so much to get to that beauty.''

La Monte, who teaches Spring Hill second-graders, sleeps with her arms around the trooper's worn clothes.

He talks to her in her dreams.

``Nadine, please come to me,'' she hears him say. ``You know I need you.''

They shared a Tampa apartment for 3 1/2 years. They depended on each other. He taught her to cook and she dressed him for work. He'd shower, then flail his hands for a towel, calling, ``Nadine?''

``You have your gun?'' she'd ask. ``Your vest?''

``What do you think?'' he'd counter, ``I'm going to come home with a bunch of bullet holes?''

She wears the wedding rings, widowed though not wed. She can't yet imagine a different life. When she switches on her cell phone, it says, ``Brad loves Nadine.''

``After a year, people don't want to hear our grieving,'' she says. ``They want to hear, `I'm doing fine, I'm dating now,' not `I cried on the way to work because I heard this song on the radio.' ''

Vickie Childers can't watch romantic movies or tragedies. She sticks to comedy.

``It's kind of like having a tooth that needs to be fixed,'' she says. ``As long as you push at it, it hurts more. So you try not to push at it, and you hope that it'll start to heal.''

Donna Bell recently left her hospital job. She supervised emergency and intensive care at Town & Country Hospital. The stress wore on her.

``I'm in that gray area, where I'm having to look up to the Lord and say, `OK, guide me here,' '' she says.

Childers feels an emerging strength. She returned to work at the Tampa Police Department, where she first met Ricky.

``I've found myself going back to being the Vickie before him,'' she says, ``doing things on my own instead of asking his advice.''

But she liked having someone to lean on. And she loved the man Carr killed. Her independence doesn't comfort her.

``Actually, it feels real alone,'' she says. ``It feels real alone.''