Marking What Matters

Something to Hold

The Personal

As the one year of the anniversary of my mother’s death was nearing, I was yearning to be able to visit my mom’s gravestone, but she didn’t have one. She and my father had been cremated, and we were actually unsure what to do with their ashes.

This was especially ironic because for years my father had a three ring binder dedicated to what to do in the event of their deaths—a notebook he constantly updated and liked to pull out when we stopped by to visit. “Daaadddd,” I’d whine, “I don’t really want to think about this right now.” “Never mind that, this is important—sit down, I’ve added a few things and want to show you.”

Sometimes, he even sent us quizzes in the mail (he was a high school teacher for thirty-five years) about what to do if he is ‘suddenly out of it’ and ‘your mother is upset.’ These quizzes usually had questions like: “Where are three places in the house you can find cash if you need to?”

“Um, under the sink in the basement and behind the TV console?”

“Yes, but you forgot about the back shelf in my office! And behind the spare tire in the trunk of my car!”

Grade: B-.

Visiting a gravestone is a concrete, tangible action to take, and I needed that, for some reason, with my mom. I didn’t have that same need with my Dad who had died two years before. I guess this is because I had more unfinished business with my mom, and with my Dad, I felt at peace.

I knew what my mother would really want was for us to scatter her ashes in the yard of her home of 45 years, but that got sold (at her insistence) probably a year before she died. I eventually found a way to do that, which was both weird and great, but I still needed something tangible for myself.

So I suggested to my siblings that we order a beautiful custom bench with a plaque with her name on it to sit in the lobby of her beloved arts organization that she had been a director of for many years. It was extremely handsome, which she would have loved, and it served as a marker for me when I needed one.

I thought of it as giving myself a little public art in a meaningful space that helped express my private loss.

Tangible. Concrete. Real.

My Mom’s Memorial Bench

The Personal x Thousands

Maya Lin designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC in 1982. It was two massive walls of names slowly rising up from the earth but still embedded—kind of referencing a tombstone really, except it was huge and listed all the names of every dead soldier.

When the design was made public, there was a huge outcry. Lots of people hated it. Vietnam veterans resented it, and felt, once again, like they were getting disrespected. Instead of a heroic bronze statue of brave soldiers like every other war memorial ever made throughout the history of time, they got a giant black wall with names.

It was a new idea with a contemporary vibe and was both bold and simple. People didn’t get it. Money was raised privately to get it built and the committee ended up erecting the third place winner’s piece as well, which was a traditional bronze statue, to placate the outraged public.

What is so fascinating to me, though, is that over time, this new minimal design that so many people hated in theory became beloved in practice. Because once it was built and people could experience it, they found out that this non-representational abstraction actually offered something much more tangible and concrete than any general heroic bronze statue ever could. Literal names. Of real people. Who died. Visiting the ‘wall’ became a pilgrimage site—a place where people still line up to find the name of their loved one, and often do a physical rubbing to take home.

Unexpectedly interactive. Very concrete.

This “abstraction” is actually offering its visitors the most specific experience a war memorial perhaps ever had—the name of their person who died. And to come to the memorial site is personal like visiting a family gravestone, but within a monumental structure that matched the degree of loss for the country as a whole. And by offering all the names together, Maya Lin created the most concrete expression of the sacrifice of war. The search for your loved ones name requires one to read all the others which highlights all the individual soldiers in a way never done before on a public war memorial, which in turn offers an expression of our collective loss. Tangible. Concrete. Real.

What a gift.

A+ Maya Lin.

Aerial View of the Vietnam War Memorial. It points to both the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Photo Credit: Aerial America (DC)/Smithsonian Channel.

Looking back, I thank goodness they didn’t take a vote from the public of which sculpture to pick for the memorial because Maya Lin’s wouldn’t have been chosen and now, everyone loves this sculpture and most people don’t even know its controversial origin story. In fact, it’s really become a standard for memorial making in the years since.

This for me, is public art at its best really. It both opened the public’s mind, broadened our collective view about what a memorial could ‘look like’, and gave people a place to transform their grief, honor the dead, and connect themselves with the past in a way that hopefully helps them move into the future.

Maya Lin was a twenty-one year old senior at Yale when she proposed this project and she basically created a new wave of public art expression. Amazing.