How memorials can help us grieve and heal

By George Stone, TRAVEL Executive Editor

The very notion of healing is encased in metaphor. The word’s ancient roots mean “to make whole,” an image that strikes a major chord.

But is this metaphor resonant enough to reconcile division and restore completeness on a mass scale? That’s the question creators of monuments—including more than a thousand of which mark the collective traumas of 9/11—have been grappling with.

“Figuring out how to memorialize 9/11 has been a monumental undertaking,” writes Vicky Hallett in our story about how contemporary memorials to collective grief seek to scratch the surface of psychology to help people mourn and move forward. “This new wave of memorials honors historic events without forgetting about the future, a shift which feels especially significant in this moment,” she writes.

Spencer Bailey, author of a new book on contemporary memorials, says that the edifices we construct need to evolve along with us, as our collective trauma transforms over time. “This new set of memorial makers is engaging in metaphor, trying to evoke complexity,” he says. Healing is a goal, but it is not the only one; studying the past to shape the future is just as important.

The modern memorial movement was ignited in the early 1980s by Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a ledge of reflective black granite—inscribed with names of the fallen—on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. “With that memorial, the earth moved. It was a landform—not representational, not a statue,” says Cornell University’s J. Meejin Yoon.

That touchstone inspired other memorials, including the “Tribute in Light,” two shining beams that illuminated the night sky south of the site of the Twin Towers for six months shortly after the attacks. The lights now reappear annually on September 11. (Pictured above, one of two reflecting pools at the 9/11 Memorial Museum sits on the site of the former Twin Towers.) “It’s a beautiful way to remember that doesn’t get mixed into the everyday built environment,” says Yoon.

Other remembrances of the attacks appeared in the following years, including a pair of waterfalls that plunge 50 feet into the ground where the Twin Towers once soared; 184 steel-and-granite benches, each bearing the name of a life lost beside the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; and a 93-foot-tall tower that sings with 40 aluminum wind chimes in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. (Related: Artifacts pulled from the rubble of 9/11 become symbols of what was lost.)

Monumental metaphors are visible around the world, at the Irish Hunger Memorial, at Norway’s Steilneset Memorial (a tribute to 17th-century residents burned for witchcraft), at Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (pictured above), and at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Alabama.

As Ozymandias reminds us, not all monuments stand the test of time. Just this week the equestrian statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, was finally removed.

The lesson is in “not treating memory as static,” says the University of Pennsylvania’s Paul Farber. “We’re 20 years since 9/11, but just starting to see the effects of the past on the present. There’s more to commemorate and understand.”

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