Types of Memorials

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Memorials are more for the living than the dead

Memorials have long since been a huge part of any culture or civilization. That is because memorializing is simply part of human nature. Death is a difficult, even frightening, prospect in most cultures, and that makes memorials a welcome comfort. Realizing the potential that one’s memory will last for the ages makes the relative brevity of human life (compared to the vastness of all of time) bearable. Without memorials, many forms of important human traditions (from ethics to religion) might be moot. Leaving a legacy is an important psychological goal to any life; in fact, that goal is what many scholars have said is the very difference between humankind and animals.

All of this is a complex way of saying what so many other great writers have said in various ways on this subject over the centuries: memorials are mostly for the living, not the dead.

So that brings us to a discussion of how, exactly, human kind has staged memorials over the years. It is interesting to note that there appears to be a change coming about, and this change seems to be rejecting the trends of the mid-late 20th century that were a renaissance of memorial trends.

In the days after World War II, memorials went from being mostly devoted to individual people (i.e. the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Monument, and the Washington Monument) to being built mostly in recognition to large groups (Veterans Memorial Stadium, the Vietnam Memorial, etc.) Memorials also went from being works of art in their own right to being structures such as public buildings and highways that had a practical use alongside their memorial purpose. Over time the generic type of memorials became commonplace all across America, so common, in fact, that nearly every city , large or small , had some sort of "memorial" structure, from a high school to a main thoroughfair to a  park to a courthouse to an arena. And, in many cases, the memorial was not to any specific person or group but, rather, to a single, very large, group -- such as all U.S. soldiers in all wars.

Gradually, this trend of generic memorials gave way, however. It proved unsatisfactory as a memorial tradition because, simply put, it was not personal. It did not meet the psychological requirements of a memorial: it did not give the individual the sense that he or she would be remembered for an eternity.

The generic memorials have now given way to the type of memorial that attempts to memorialize large groups along with individuals. The Vietnam Memorial, for example, honors all who died in the Vietnam war, but it also beautifully lists every name of everyone who died. The same is true of the Okalahoma City bombing memorial, and countless other memorial structures across the country devoted to the memory of specific groups and people.

No longer are memorials expected to be necessarily functional. That trend seems to have gone by the wayside because, as one University of California at Davis professor found, few, if any,current students of his school know that the institution’s "Memorial Union" building is dedicated to UC-Davis students and alumni who lost their lives in World War II.

Gradually, we are returning in America to what has for most of humankind’s history, been the chief function of memorials: to remember the dead and give the living the assurance that they, too, will be remembered for eternity.