![]() ![]() Though I have been to powerful memory sites in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and around the US, studied commemorative practices, and written about some, I wasn’t prepared for the mix of intense emotions that roiled within me at the installation in my hometown: grief, fury, fear, a surprising contemplative calm that soothed me like a soft breeze, and an unexpected eagerness to engage with other people there. ![]() Thanks to the efforts of the artist Jacqueline von Edelberg and a handful of other volunteers who have stepped up to maintain the site, it has become a dynamic interactive installation and continual communal gathering place unlike any I have ever witnessed. They sit among myriad testimonial objects arrayed within a covered walkway - a pavilion of domed skylights over brick pavement - that runs along a stretch of Central Avenue, the town’s main drag (and part of the July 4 parade route). Those stones and veladoras grabbed my focus for the way they evoke the mix of mourning traditions among Highland Park residents and even more, for a palpable sense of the many individual hands that placed them there. Though I left there in the mid-1970s - a few years before gun companies began selling to civilians the military-style weapons that now dominate the market - my mom still lives there, and visiting two weeks ago, I stopped by the memorial to pay my respects. Those are far from the only items that make up a stunning ad hoc public memorial in Highland Park, Illinois, the suburb of Chicago where I grew up. Sharing sidewalk and ledges, these Jewish grave-visitation stones and Catholic Mexican veladoras jointly mark sacred space for remembering the seven people gunned down during the Independence Day parade on that very street this summer - and beyond, the more than 40,000 people on average lost to gun violence in the United States each year. ![]() Then the candles: cylindrical and about eight inches high, encased in glass adorned with images of Jesus or the Virgin of Guadalupe. First I noticed the stones: some painted, some wrapped with orange yarn, all of them a little flat and small enough to fit easily in the palm of a human hand. ![]()
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