My immediate family doesn't like to do the funeral thing. We don't go for the open caskets, don't go to church or synagogue... when my grandmother died, she was cremated — her firm choice, even though we're Jewish. We chose to have her memorial service in the back yard of her home. Friends and relatives gathered to tell stories about her. I wore a blue dress because she always hated black. Anyway, we wanted to celebrate the good years of her life rather than dwell on the sad way it drew to a close.
So naturally, this attitude towards funerals and death has seeped into me. (Not completely — I do love a good walk in a nice cemetery!) I see the photos of people gathering at the World Trade Center site, and I read about the plans for a memorial to be established there, and in some ways I understand it... it's like trying to take a place where something horrible happened and purify it again, the way that people leave flowers at the site of a horrible car accident. But in other ways, it completely puzzles me.
Because such memorializing can only commemorate the tragedy. It can't truly commemorate the lives of the people who died that day.
Think about it. Would you like people to think of you only in relation to your workplace or commute path?
So I think they should make plaques — I always liked those little blue historical plaques all over London, etc. — and place them in the places where those people lived and played. Places that meant something to them. Include a few autobiographical details. "Joe was a guitarist and liked to play poker and watch South Park. This is the bar he used to hang out in with his buddies." "Sarah loved spending time with her kids and her kids' friends. This is the park they used to spend Saturdays in."
Sure, the effect would be less dramatic, more diffuse... but people would notice them from time to time. Maybe they'd even stop and read one.
And those people would be remembered, not once a year on September 11 or whenever the president wants to promote another distasteful policy, but in the places they loved.
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