Guest Post: Temporary Memorials As Sites Of Grief
The below guest post was written by my wonderful husband! He has a background in art history and works in collections management across local historic sites.
In recent years, we in the US have had to see a number of temporary memorials rise up. These memorials mark untimely, especially traumatic, deaths usually associated with victims of gun violence, brutality, or accidents. Memorials, especially if they are on the site of the event, become places to be in community with those lost and inhabit the same space, even if it is a headspace that is in memoriam. But these spaces aren’t just for remembering the dead, for the living temporary memorials become liminal sites that help individuals confront the trauma of sudden and often violent death.
Pulse Memorial attribution: Image taken from Gov. Dannel Malloy’s Flickr page. (https://www.flickr.com/photos/governordanmalloy/)
Temporary memorials are deeply personal and intimate spaces. They aren’t memorials to greater ideals or even abstract concepts despite the fact that they are usually situated within a greater societal context often becoming watershed moments for social movements. The community finds particular power and catharsis in setting up, contributing to, and experiencing these sites of memory and grief. And they follow several distinct characteristics: spontaneous, physical, and inherently experiential.
Temporary memorials are spontaneous, meaning their particulars aren’t necessarily pre-planned or their sites aren’t chosen from a list of candidates. Spontaneity doesn’t mean they aren’t scripted into fulfilling a specific social function, though. These types of memorials blur the lines between traditional grief and mourning. Grief is the initial emotional anguish, usually over death and loss, while mourning, a drawn-out process, is the external social behavior informed by larger cultural practices. The prevalence of temporary memorials, and the immediacy they represent by being spontaneous, compress the period of grief and mourning and project that period onto a specific site. This expresses a larger social shift from private to public expression of emotions, or at least a society that has come to expect a greater number of immediate and untimely tragedies. Meaning temporary memorials are sets onto which a codified vocabulary of mourning and the social norms of the community are expressed publicly and ritualistically.
These memorials present a backdrop for a unique script of memorialization and remembering centered around traumatic events or sites of deep harm. Because of the nature of these types of memorials, the spaces hold a power and become loci of grief and mourning, especially for members of the community. Some of the most notable examples of this type of memorial are at sites of extreme violence or brutality- the fence Matthew Shepard was tied to and beaten, Columbine High School, Pulse Nightclub, and the intersection of 38th Str. And Chicago Ave. in Minneapolis - the George Floyd memorial.
Temporary memorials are also physical and experiential, which is key to members of the afflicted community. Because of that, they are sites of personal practice and ritual dictated by one’s expressions of grief, loss, and pain. This is informed by and funnels down through several filters: the larger social expression of grief, the community’s particularities, and the individual’s rituals of expression. Temporary memorials are, as one scholar has put it, “aggressively physical” and demand some type of interaction. At minimum, one has to acknowledge and navigate the space- walk around it, walk through it - and for many, moving through space is an exercise in ritual. These sites are enhanced by interaction: kneeling or sitting in parts, reading messages from others who visited (whether they’re messages to victims or messages to the community engaging with the memorial), or touching the materials of the structure or offerings.
Temporary memorials are reflections of a larger public sentiment for the community effected. These sites are public performances of values and beliefs held by the community doing the commemorating and they already have a symbolic vocabulary to use. This symbolic vocabulary includes photographs of those lost, candles, religious iconography, symbols associated with the community (for example rainbows and pride icons for the LGBTQ+ community), flowers, and messages. And the combination of these symbols, the actions of grief, and the values they express are the trappings to sanctify a site and give temporary memorials power and significance.
George Floyd Memorial attribution: Image taken from Chad Davis’s Flickr page (https://www.flickr.com/people/146321178@N05)
Temporary memorials are also physical and experiential, which is key to members of the afflicted community. Because of that, they are sites of personal practice and ritual dictated by one’s expressions of grief, loss, and pain. This is informed by and funnels down through several filters: the larger social expression of grief, the community’s particularities, and the individual’s rituals of expression. Temporary memorials are, as one scholar has put it, “aggressively physical” and demand some type of interaction. At minimum, one has to acknowledge and navigate the space- walk around it, walk through it - and for many, moving through space is an exercise in ritual. These sites are enhanced by interaction: kneeling or sitting in parts, reading messages from others who visited (whether they’re messages to victims or messages to the community engaging with the memorial), or touching the materials of the structure or offerings.
Temporary memorials are reflections of a larger public sentiment for the community effected. These sites are public performances of values and beliefs held by the community doing the commemorating and they already have a symbolic vocabulary to use. This symbolic vocabulary includes photographs of those lost, candles, religious iconography, symbols associated with the community (for example rainbows and pride icons for the LGBTQ+ community), flowers, and messages. And the combination of these symbols, the actions of grief, and the values they express are the trappings to sanctify a site and give temporary memorials power and significance.
