Do we need memorials or memorials need us?
When an unexpected tragedy strikes individual and communities are shell-shocked. We
feel sadness, anger, disbelief and grief – and sometimes all at once. We mourn prematurely
severed bond between the dead and the living. The questions about the healing, growth and
a path to resilience come only later.
Memorials can provide a place of sanctuary for mourning, but the therapeutic purpose of
memorials and remembrance should not be taken for granted. It would seem that, for the
survivors of terrorist attacks, memorialisation matters more in the immediate aftermath
of a tragedy and violence. It symbolises acknowledgment, societal solidarity, closeness and
empathy. It’s a sort of a sympathetic hug of a society of strangers. But when candles burn
and flowers wither away, political or societal pressure to memorialise must not be forced
upon the survivors and their families. Remembrance has its therapeutic limits but in order
to succeed it requires that those who are left behind have the ownership of their own grief
process.
Whoever suffered a loss or a tragedy, knows well that post-traumatic recovery and coping
with loss needs a lot of time. There is no magic formula that can help dealing with the
grief and void left by a tragedy. Psychology teaches that a road to healing goes through five
stages of grief, the outcome of which is supposed to be acceptance of loss. It means being
able to get a hold of the pain and acknowledging the “new” reality in which our dear ones
do not reside anymore. Yet, every road to recovery is different: sometimes that road begins
with remembrance, and sometimes it will depart from it.
More than a right to remembrance,
we must offer to the survivors the
right to move forward on the path
of healing and recovery.
References Bibliography
(1) https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-
insistence-of-memory/ Erica Doss (2010). Memorial Mania. Chicago:
University Press.
(2) https://balkanist.net/placing-all-bets-on-
memorials-memory-mania-goes-balkans/ Gérôme Truc (2018). Shell shocked. The social
response to terrorist attacks. Malden: Polity
Press.
David Rieff (2016). In Praise of forgetting.
Historical memory and its ironies. London: Yale
University Press.
Ana Milošević (2018). “Historicizing the
present: Brussels attacks and heritagization of
spontaneous memorials.” International Journal
for Heritage Studies 24(1): 53-65.
Timothy Longman (2017). Memory and Justice
in Post-Genocide Rwanda. Cambridge: University
Press.
Heleen Touquet and Ana Milošević (2018).
“When Reconciliation Becomes the R-Word:
Dealing with the Past in Former Yugoslavia” in
Krondorfer, Bjorn (ed). Reconciliation in Global
Context: Why it is Needed and How it Works. New
York: CU NY.
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