How We Remember

STEVE LISS FOR TIME
Who Sits Here? The 168 chairs at the Oklahoma City Memorial, each individually dipped in bronze, commemorate the dead and inspire the living

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STEVE LISS FOR TIME

REFLECTION: Visitors at the Oklahoma memorial's entrance

"No," she says. "Out of respect, I don't. The chairs are still very hard for me to look at. You see them, and you understand the impact of the loss. But it's different every time I'm here. You also see the triumph over evil."

The American way of death, which historically has shuttled between the extremes of denial and desire, seems to be tending toward desire these days. The instantaneous monuments that are tossed together with flowers, stuffed animals and personal messages, such as those that followed the deaths of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. and the TWA Flight 800 disaster, suggest that the country is ready, even eager, to connect with ideas of death and the past, no matter how superficial that connection may sometimes be. Victims of gang wars, drive-by shootings and drug deaths are instantly memorialized with murals on walls in the inner cities. Serious changes in national attitudes may also be reflected in these projects. Places like the Manzanar National Historical site in the California desert, where an internment camp for Japanese Americans was located in World War II, and the 42 sites dedicated to the bloody history of the civil rights movement indicate that the country is as interested in the shadows of its history as in the light.

Modern memorials are more fluid, both in purpose and construction, than they once were--less set in stone. In March, widows of those killed in Vietnam launched an "Interactive Widows of War Living Memorial" on the Internet. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982), the Korean War Veterans Memorial (1995), the Women in Military Service for America Memorial (1997) are all replicated in a number of states and towns. In 1998 a scale model of the Vietnam Memorial wall, called a Healing Wall, became a traveling exhibit so that people in local communities could experience the feelings of those who visit the original in Washington.

Memorials are more democratic these days as well, created in the name of and for the uses of ordinary people. The reason that Jeanine Gist can feel conflicting thoughts about the Oklahoma City Memorial is that it was designed and built with her conflicts in mind--hers and those of visitors who have no familial relationship with the people honored yet feel the various powers of the place, nonetheless. Not long ago, Americans wanted to tear down evidence of mass horrors; the initial thought with Columbine High School was to obliterate the school and start anew--America's old, insistent, forward-looking impulse. Now there are plans to create a permanent memorial in a park alongside the school. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington consecrate ordinary people and offer places where ordinary people can reach a personal understanding.

Then, too, there is the matter of permanence. Memorials have always been useful to societies to establish and confirm common values, to send messages to posterity about what is significant and worth preserving. Statues, tombs, arches, pyramids, obelisks: all have stood for abstractions such as heroism, sacrifice and valor. A place like the Oklahoma City Memorial or the Vietnam Memorial can send its own messages by challenging the simplicity of such values. By questioning what has been appreciated without examination--the glorification of war, for instance--a monument becomes a statement of values itself. Old memorials used to honor permanence. Newer ones treat permanence as an illusion.

Ed Linenthal, a professor of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin and the author of a forthcoming book on the Oklahoma City Memorial, says that with the advent of the new memorials, "the memory of the event will be as transforming as the event itself and as humanizing as the event was dehumanizing." In the case of Oklahoma City, one of the memorial's purposes is "to teach us to be the antithesis of what is portrayed." Similarly, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (on which Oklahoma City is modeled), the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the American Immigrant Wall of Honor at Ellis Island, the battlefield sites of Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, Little Big Horn and others are teaching institutions, telling the story of the event by means of videos, texts and artifacts. The World War II memorial in Washington, in the planning stages, will include a teaching museum.

The new memorials are not only education sites; they are also, at a primal level, burial places--"a communal site of memory," says Linenthal. The chairs at the Oklahoma City Memorial contain what is often called the presence of absence. To Linenthal, the new memorials are "places of civic transformation" as well; one should come away changed. And they are sites of public protest, "where one cries out in anguish against the event, to keep it in living memory."