Memorials are for the living
Memorial Day offers needed link between quick and dead
By Carl Heintze
On a low bluff near Hanapepe on Kauai, the most northerly of the Hawaiian islands, almost buried in tall grass lies a small cemetery looking out to the wide Pacific Ocean. Most of the gravestones are Japanese, small rock towers with Japanese characters inscribed on them. They mark the remains of workers who once labored in the nearby sugar cane fields. These days the cemetery is mostly forgotten, the sugar cane industry is dying and the graves seem abandoned, although here and there the tall grass has been cleared away and fruit has been left by some of the gravestones instead of flowers, as is the custom in Asia.
I was thinking of the cemetery not long ago when the memorial to the dead of the Oklahoma City bombing was unveiled--the stark rows of empty chairs, including those for the infants who died in the child care center when the federal office building was blow apart five years ago.
And I also thought of all those other memorable memorials: the stark black wall of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, the figures of the Confederate generals on Stone Mountain near Atlanta, the stone columns that fill every village square in Germany and France to mark the dead of World Wars I and II. Even in the desert in Mexico are small cemeteries where the dead are remembered with humble stones and plastic flowers.
Memorials, as someone has said, are for the living and not for the dead. They have been built to remind us of some terrible event like the Oklahoma bombing, or, at the least, an individual's death, as in the small Japanese cemetery near Hanapepe.
The dead, of course, don't need these remembrances. Presumably by death they have escaped from suffering to tranquillity. But for the living, for the widows and widowers of the Oklahoma City bombing, for the mothers and fathers who lost children, the suffering and loss remain. And for them, for all who have given up fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters over the years, especially by the terrible force of war, hatred or just plain death, it seems essential to have a place to go and mourn, to be able to touch some solid stone that somehow links the living to the dead.
Witness those in Oklahoma City who hugged the stone chair that marked their loved one or the thousands upon thousands who go to the Vietnam Memorial simply to touch the name of someone they knew and loved .The chair and the name on the black wall are not the person who has disappeared, but they remain somehow all there is to touch, all there is to link the living with those who have lost their lives through whatever reasons.
In time, of course, the mourners will no longer mourn. They, too, will become the mourned, although perhaps they will have had an easier death than did those in Oklahoma City, Vietnam or Pearl Harbor. When that has happened loss will seem less for there will be fewer and fewer living persons who knew the dead. The monuments the living have erected will remain, but with fewer and fewer visitors.
Indeed, that is what has happened at the cemetery at Hanapepe. Some graves have become buried in grass and almost lost to view. It is only by walking carefully that it is possible to find them, still marked, but almost invisible and now out of the sight of the sea.
Perhaps some day it will be that way in Oklahoma City. Small children, passing those starkly empty chairs, will wonder what they are meant to represent and we will at last we able to forget the hate that caused them to be erected. Some day--but not this year, nor even next.
But it will happen some day. For I do not think in the end memorials do more than remind the living of the terrible events that created them.
Next to the Hanapepe cemetery, by a strange coincidence, is what Kauaians call "the glass beach," a place where before recycling programs began, residents of the island tossed their glass bottles and broken crockery. Over the years, the ocean pushed the broken bottles back and forth and the sand ground them smooth and tiny until they have become like jewels, sparkling green, brown and blue in the low surf.
The ocean, God, Nature, whatever one may call it, has turned waste into beauty. Now Hawaiians, and some tourists as well, come to pick among the bits of glass for beauty to decorate their homes. Perhaps the world will do this to memorials, too. Perhaps over the centuries the stone that marked death will somehow be transformed into beauty and the dead will, in their own way, return to a new and different kind of life.
At least one still living may so hope.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.
Los Gatos, California Since 1881
