memorials

A little recycling here: there was an article on Salon.com on Memorial Day by Garrison Keillor, in which he argued that a better monument to the dead from 9/11 would be words, rather than another statue.

I didn't agree, and I posted a letter in response. I'm copying it here for a change of pace from updates on our house hunt:

I would argue that it's not words that matter, nor just monuments, but names -- names give some substance to the losses of so many people that are otherwise an abstraction.

The first time I had this sense was when I probably about 9 and we visited the Menin Gate in Ypres. It has the names of roughly 54,000 soldiers from Britain and the rest of the Commonwealth(barring New Zealand and Newfoundland) who were the missing from fighting around Ypres up until August 1917. Re-read that last sentence: the missing, not the dead; the ones of whom no trace was left.

Even as a child I found that unspeakably tragic; as I've aged it stands as a touchstone for the difference between the horrors of war in defensible cause versus deaths over imperial hubris and incompetent leadership.

The second time was when I saw when I did the traditional DC summer internship in 1990. Some friends and I walked over to the Vietnam Memorial, and there was a guy there, standing next to a park ranger who was up on a ladder taking a rubbing of the first name on the monument -- the father of the visitor. This guy couldn't have been more than a toddler when his father died, and it was a moment that I almost would rather have not seen -- it was emblematic of all the losses and absences that "ordinary people" suffer on all sides of a war, the losses and absences that linger for children with no parents, parents who bury their children, and so on and so forth.

The third time this happened took me somewhat by surprise. My then-girlfriend / now-wife and I were visiting Edinburgh and I had decided to propose to her at Edinburgh Castle, because why not... anyway, as we were walking through the castle I suddenly realized that before I asked, I wanted her to come into the Hall of Honour in the Scottish National War Memorial so we could look up my grandfather, who died during WWII in the service when my father was all of 6 months old. Because aside from one or two pictures, it's all I really know of him. And because for some reason it mattered to me that she at least see that for me, part of being alive is remembering. Anyway, we went and looked, and afterwards (thank goodness) she said yes.

Point being, I think as people we need something to go and look at, somewhere we can go, to remember, and without names it's just an abstraction in marble.