“He loved to cook. People used to come over all the time to eat what he made. Nobody comes over to eat anymore. My own children didn’t even come over to eat what I had cooked on Thanksgiving. It hurt my feelings a little, but he was the cook. He had lots of specialties.”

Teresa Russell, wife

Robert E. Russell, 52, met his wife at her 16th birthday party. When he proposed to her four years later, he promised to buy her a large house with a white picket fence, take her to Paris and, in their eighties, sit together on their porch with their great-grandchildren.

"Every dream's come true, but not that last one," said Teresa Russell, 50, a human resources specialist at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Her husband, a civilian budgetary supervisor for the Army, worked at the Pentagon and hasn't been seen since the attack. He was born in Columbia, S.C., and raised in Capitol Heights and had received degrees from the University of Maryland and Boston University. He and his wife had three children: Cydne, 30, Robert, 28, and Valerie, 14.

On Friday evening, Teresa Russell sat in her multilevel home on Lindsay Road in Oxon Hill holding two of her six young grandchildren, and she thought of the days ahead. "How can I go back to work and concentrate when there's no closure?" she asked. "My husband's not even buried -- if he is, in fact, dead."

Russell got up from her living room sofa, looked at one of the dozens of pictures of her husband on the walls and smiled. His face, it seemed, brought her some peace.

-- Steven Gray