Temporary memorials will eventually lead to talk of something permanent. Then it will get complicated.
Early on the Saturday morning after the shooting, a handful of people shuffle side to side, gazing at the flowers, plants, and crayoned words on the Remembrance Wall in Downtown. Photos of all 58 victims hang in no particular order. For every victim, a tree has been planted.
The site, just north of Charleston Boulevard, is called the Healing Garden. It was built in four days with donated time and material by volunteers who shed sweat and tears as they dug and hammered and molded concrete.
As the horrific events of October 1 recede in time, talk will eventually sway toward construction of a permanent memorial. And that, in many ways, will reopen wounds. Difficult questions will abound: Where should a memorial go? On the site? What should be memorialized, the loss of 58 specific lives or the trauma inflicted on the city? What form will it take? Who should decide? How political will the process get? Should there even be a memorial?
James Young has seen it before.
(Photo right: Brent Holmes)
Young is a professor emeritus of English and Judaic and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Among his credits is his appointment to the jury for the National 9/11 Memorial design competition. In the late 1990s, Germany made him chair of a five-person committee to choose that country’s Memorial to Europe’s Murdered Jews. His most recent book is 2016’s The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss and the Spaces Between (University of Massachusetts Press).
What should Nevada do to memorialize the 58 killed, the hundreds wounded, and the thousands forever scarred by 10 minutes around 10 p.m. on October 1?
The first thing is give it space and time.
“Everybody needs to step back and take a deep breath and include in their idea of the memorial the grieving process,” Young says. “Give families the space to grieve their loved ones before arriving at a civic meeting.”
And yet, he adds, some early official movement toward a memorial could help ward off special-interest groups seeking to politicize the installation or steer it toward a specific message — and that even includes families of the victims.
Remembering the deaths could serve a useful function legally — “I would want to ... remember these people who died at the hands of semi-autos made to work like automatic weapons as cases to study in order to improve gun laws,” Young says — but that might not be the proper function of a memorial.
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In 2012, after 20 children and six adults were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, some families jumped into the memorial discussion, wanting to make their children martyrs to bad gun laws, Young recalls.
“That led to a gigantic letdown and tears when the (proposed) memorial had nothing to do with that.” And, in fact, Sandy Hook is still working on its memorial. (The school was torn down after the shooting, and a new one built on the same site.)
Kyle Lyddy grew up in Newtown, a city of 28,000. He’s now chairman of the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial Commission, which was appointed nine months after the shooting.
After nearly four years, the commission finally has a site for its memorial, about a quarter-mile from the school, on donated land. That location was chosen from a list of 30 suggestions. It also has a 30-page document to guide and memorialize the work that’s gone into the project.
“That’s from surveys of community members, input qualitative and quantitative; we solicited community members at large,” Lyddy says. The Sandy Hook commission is now taking design ideas. What would Lyddy like to see?
“I’ve tried to be so unbiased and navigate it appropriately,” Lyddy says. “But I think just continuing to comprehend and understand the individuals rather than the event. I just envision something tranquil, quiet, peaceful.”
One issue that any Route 91 memorial effort will have to confront is location. It’s hard to imagine the entire 15-acre festival site — which MGM Resorts International paid $37 million for four years ago — being dedicated to it. Perhaps a corner of the site, dedicated to quiet contemplation, Young suggests.
“And you may want to consecrate the place and for the first year, we remember this and the victims,” he adds. “And we’re not going to celebrate where and how they died — we’re going to celebrate their lives, and have a memorial concert, and it’s going to show how we come back and we retake the city.”
MGM didn’t respond to a request for comment.
One of the unfortunate aspects of being on a memorial commission is that you end up visiting other communities that have suffered, to learn how they handled it. Sandy Hook studied Columbine. Barbara Poma will look at Sandy Hook, New York City, and Oklahoma City.
Poma is the owner of Pulse nightclub in Orlando. On June 12, 2016, a man entered the gay club and gunned down 49, injuring another 53. Until Las Vegas, it was the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
“Sadly, we have quite a few people who’ve come before us and led the journey and know what works and what doesn’t,” Poma says.
Poma is the founder and executive director of onePULSE Foundation. It was established to “oversee a community initiative to create a permanent memorial to Pulse and those who perished.”
The Sandy Hook committee took years to find the right location. In Poma’s case, that was resolved quickly: It’ll be on the site of her nightclub.
Poma acknowledges that some in Orlando’s business community just want the issue to go away. Nonetheless, the onePULSE Foundation website is surveying the public about a memorial to come up with something that fits myriad desires. The questions it asks speak to the complexities ahead. For instance, should the memorial be a gathering place to celebrate love and life? Should it be educational? Should it include an LGBTQ focus? Should it speak to terrorism and hate crimes? Should the club be torn down?
Poma can’t envision what the memorial will look like; she doesn’t want to. “I love that I have no ideas because I can’t wait to see what the competition brings to us.”
But she does know this: “It’ll have a dual purpose, so that the lives taken are honored and never forgotten,” she says. “And it’s part of American history at this point. When my children have children, I want them to be able to learn about it and go to the site and understand what happened.”
Amanda Fortini, a journalist and visiting professor at UNLV, wrote about the shooting for The New Yorker. She thinks the idea of a memorial, especially on the Strip, has the potential to create tension: “Between people who want to remember and people who want to move on,” she says. “People are here and trying to have fun, and the Strip is a business. How much do people want to look at it?
“That’s not to say the wounded or survivors wouldn’t want to memorialize it,” Fortini adds. “It makes perfect sense to have the impulse to memorialize it. ... But I could see where some might just want to forget.”
It wouldn’t be the first time. In November 1980, a fire in the MGM hotel-casino (now Bally’s) killed 85 people. Thirty-seven years later, you won’t find any reminder of it on the Strip.
