How we remember Oklahoma City

I read it quite early in my research. It's really about the whole variety of ways that people in Oklahoma City sought to claw themselves out and try to give it meaning. It's about how we make a narrative out of something that is essentially meaningless, and it's a very important task. We see in Oklahoma City a very different way of dealing with the locations of violence. We used to tear them down, pave them over, and quickly forget about them--places like John Wayne Gacy's home and Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment building were razed. Now, the Murrah Building site has become part of the National Park Service, through a memorial process that was self-consciously designed to help people engage the bombing. I think that is a remarkable achievement. Was the change in the way we memorialize our tragedies rapid or slow? Clearly the popularity of the Vietnam War memorial made a difference. It democratized memorialization--people etching names, leaving things. That was never expected at the beginning. The same thing happened in Oklahoma City. Also, while are other examples of violent sites being memorialized, there has not been a massive memorialization of a domestic site of mass murder, so Oklahoma City did represent something different. People have been killed on planes, but the public deals with it once and then it's gone from the newspapers and television. Oklahoma City, because of the extent of the media coverage, was living with this day after day. Then there was the image of the fireman and the baby. It was an iconic American photograph, as well-recognized as images of mushroom clouds and the naked child [whose home was] bombed by napalm in Vietnam. It just symbolizes the event so well. In Oklahoma City, the urge to memorialize the event emerged very, very early. I think that people felt so impotent that for them, memorialization became their response to violence. I do think the idea of a 350-member memorial task force, largely made up of family members and survivors, brought about in the midst of searing grief just a few months after the bombing, was amazing. To create what they did--build an incredible memorial that's really a whole memorial environment--was remarkable. They created a mission statement and had a design process, and the strength and integrity of the process carried them along the whole way. I'm assuming that the development of the 24-hour news cycle made things different in Oklahoma City. Definitely. It allowed this imagined community of the bereaved to be huge, and spread all over the world. In both very appropriate and moving ways--and sometimes in inappropriate and troubling ways--people all over entered into the lives of family members and survivors of the bombing. They lived with the drama of so-and-so looking for their baby for a week. They lived with these images day after day, 24 hours a day, and then revisited it during the first anniversary, the second anniversary, the trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the fifth anniversary, and then once again with McVeigh's execution. The media coverage enfranchised people thousands of miles away to enter into the lives of the community in a way they never would if they were in their own community. Would these people walk down the street in their hometown, see a funeral, and just walk on in? Yet they sent thousands of letters and items, they drove to Oklahoma City, they brought things. It was quite an unprecedented outpouring. It was very, very moving. Oklahoma City sparked memories among war veterans, women who had been raped, families who had lost children. And the horror of the day care center--for a lot of people, that punctuated what we know but don't like to admit, that there are no more zones of safety. But this also led to troubling stuff. People were falling in love with survivors they saw on TV. People were offering family members all kinds of inappropriate stuff. Some were even coming and stalking some of the mothers of murdered children. They talked about people who they didn't know as "friends." That's troubling. You're very critical of how the problems of grieving people were handled. Tell me about that. I began to be uncomfortable when I saw descriptions of what people were supposed to feel during different stages of grief. It seems to me that it doesn't work like that. The stages are not an exact template. When the building was imploded a few weeks after the bombing, articles were everywhere--even in publications like --saying that the demolition "brought closure." One network news reporter said a month after the bombing that "the grieving is over, and the healing has begun." It was astonishing to me. I was interested in talking to federal employees, all of whom had different stories to tell. Some said their bosses said, "We'd like you back at the office fairly soon, but you're welcome to work yourself back into things slowly." Some were told, "You can take some time off, but when you come back to work, you'll need to be well." Where are the term limits for grief? All kinds of people were diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But why must people who are grieving be considered "sick"? Maybe your "symptoms" just mean that you're grieving. I interviewed a number of psychologists, and they told me they were very troubled that PTSD was becoming a wastebasket that all kinds of people could be put into. Several told me it did a lot of harm. Some people who had begun to make conscious efforts to work in the memorial projects, or express themselves through the arts, or work for reform did not want to be labeled as "patients." This is an issue that goes well beyond Oklahoma City. It's the medicalization of political violence. How were federal employees affected by the bombing? Some of the most moving interviews I had were with survivors--people like Richard Williams of the General Services Administration--who told stories of the building being a real part of their lives. This was a community. Richard Wiliams knew everybody in the building. Lots of survivors would talk about deciding whose funeral to go, to because five were being held at the same time. That's more funerals in 10 days than most of us will go to in a lifetime. Many felt shock at being looked upon as the faceless government rather than human beings. Quite clearly, this was an attack on the government. What Oklahoma City reminds us so powerfully is that the government is made up of individuals--thousands and thousands of them doing their jobs. April 19 is a very, very different day for them now, even those beyond Oklahoma City. I certainly have a greater appreciation for that now, after writing the book. What surprised you the most about this subject? I was surprised and very moved by the incredible breadth of strong reactions to the bombing from around the world. It was stunning. I was also surprised by how early everyone in Oklahoma City and everywhere else began thinking about memorial--within hours of the bombing. On a personal level, I will always remember the trust that people of Oklahoma City gave me in my work. These were really people who didn't know me well. Granted, many of them, though not all, had already talked to the media. But almost everyone was willing to share with me very powerful and personal stories. I always felt the burden and blessing of that covenant as I went about writing the book. Whether or not people like the book, or whether or not they agree with my interpretations, I always tried in every word I wrote to be mindful and respectful of the trust that had been extended to me. For me, the book is my way of saying thank you, and my way of adding another story, really, to the memorialization. You write very powerfully about your mixed emotions when Richard Williams gave you a piece of the rubble from the Murrah Building. Tell me your feelings about that. There are bits of rubble in buildings all over the country, and it has become a relic of importance for the federal government. One night after Richard and I had been at dinner--we were already good friends, and since then, we have become even closer--he brought me as a gift a small piece of rubble from the building. I was very touched because I knew that Richard was in a sense saying, "I know you well enough now to trust you with this." It was an intimate act of friendship. But I faced a struggle. I accepted it with all the kindness and grace that he meant for me to have, but when I got back to Wisconsin, I asked myself, "What do I do with this?" I thought that it would be obscene to show it to people--you know, "Hey, look what I have!" Part of why it felt so wrong is that I'm a firm believer in artifacts being charged things that we should treat with respect. This rubble had come from a tremendous tragedy, and I felt I should treat it with tremendous dignity. So what I decided to do was to keep it to honor Richard, but never show it around. Rather, I would keep it in a box at my office. Now I'm having second thoughts. I will talk to Richard about this, but what I'm thinking of doing now is to use it in teaching about the power of artifacts. That might be a way to honor the kind of teaching that the memorial foundation is interested in. Why did the memorial-building process work so well in this case? You note in the book that success wasn't preordained--a lot of people felt passionately that their design concept was the best and only way to proceed. In my opinion, it was because there were remarkably gifted people involved, particularly in the decision-making areas. One of the first things they did was to learn from other memorial projects. They created a mission statement that was very significant. It was so well done that it really became a point of orientation for everyone. It also worked because, against all professional advice, the primary voices were the voices of family members and survivors. They were not the only voices, and they did not bully people, but they were the primary voices. So, miraculously, there was consensual agreement almost all the way along the line. How well do you think the now-completed memorial complex works? As a human and an American--setting aside all the history I know--I think it's a magnificent site. The museum is unspeakably powerful. At night, I think the outdoor memorial, with the lit empty chairs, is the most moving place in the United States. In general, why are memorials so important to a culture? That's a huge question. I think memorials are important for all kinds of reasons. They're the ways we remember people and events. They're ways of carving out, in this case, a reminder of unspeakable horror. There are often important factors such as what they remember and what they don't. For members of certain ethnic communities, they can be a way of rewriting themselves back into history. That's part of why the arguments are so vociferous. It's about who gets to represent history. To me, the history of how a memorial came to be is important. It should be no surprise that the process is often like pulling teeth. It should be. It would be strange if Germany could say, "A Holocaust memorial? No problem--we can just bang that out in a few weeks." They should have to agonize over it.