MEMORIALS
The grief is still fresh. The pain still pulses. And judging by the accounts of at least seven different communities that have each experienced similar mass violence, it is probably too early to start planning a permanent memorial.
“Everybody thinks, ‘You’ve got to do a memorial, do it fast,’” Lora Knowlton, a founding member of the Columbine Memorial Foundation, told the Las Vegas Review-journal. “Ultimately our advice is: go slow.”
The Columbine High School shooting memorial took about eight years to plan, construct and dedicate. And it didn’t happen without an initial, colossal failure.
That failure took place in a public library near the school, several months after the 1999 shooting, which claimed the lives of 12 students and one teacher.
There, Knowlton and a few others presented the families of the victims with three different design concepts for a possible Columbine memorial, created with the help of a local landscaping firm.
“And they flipped,” Knowlton recalled. “The families were not ready to do a memorial.”
While Knowlton thought she and the original memorial committee were doing the “right thing” on a good timeline, she learned that day that some families “were not getting the time and space they needed to grieve their loss.”
So the committee took a break for about six months, then slowly started back up again.
“But we started back up again with the families in the loop, so they were an active participant in the planning process,” Knowlton said. “I always encourage people to take your time, reach out to the community very methodically, and try to pull together a committee that’s a great cross section of the community itself.”
Here in Las Vegas, the families of about 10 people killed Oct. 1 have already reached out to Clark County Commission Chairman Steve Sisolak, asking about the possibility of a permanent memorial.
“Some family members have told me they’d like something as simple as a flagpole or a tree. Others want something more elaborate,” Sisolak said. “The most important thing to me by far is that we’re really extremely sensitive to the wishes of the families. We need to loop them into the discussions when we move forward.”
Sisolak said at least a year should pass before formal discussions begin about creating a memorial. But it’s an important endeavor to undertake.
“If it would bring some sort of comfort and healing to those families, then I can’t see a downside to it,” he said.
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From start to finish, the planning of the Aurora memorial came with a series of challenges.
There was the obvious grief. And a murder trial, since the gunman lived, which tormented relatives as it dragged on. And, of course, the issue of money.
The entirety of the soon-to-be completed Aurora memorial was funded through private donations. It took years of volunteers working booths at community events — even a lemonade stand — to gather the funds. But by 2016, the group had enough to hire an artist. And by late 2017, the design was approved.
Through the course of many monthly meetings, victims’ families
MEMORIALS