Memorialization - Why?

The following is a speech given at Woodlawn Memorial Park, Orlando Florida in 1996. The occasion was the grand opening of one of the United States’ first dedicated cremation memorialization gardens.

Let me begin my response to this question by asking another. Imagine, if you can, arriving at your home one day and finding it on fire. You jump out of your car and are told that your family has already safely escaped the blaze. A fireman rushes over to you and says that there is time for you to run inside your home and save just one material thing.

What would that one thing be for you?

Perhaps a number of you have already answered this question similar to the majority of respondents in a recent survey. Many people, when confronted with this stark choice of saving just one thing did not choose their personal computers, televisions, VCRs, or furniture. They wanted to save their photo albums.

Worthless pieces of glossy paper on the open market are priceless pieces of history to individuals. Photographs, in their essence, are in fact memorials to the way we were and reminders of what we have become. They are tangible evidence of the links that tie together the past, the present, and the future. Simple, common photographs.

What are some other commonplace memorials? How about the ritual of teenage sweethearts carving their initials into a tree, a newborn's footprints imprinted in plaster, a license plate bearing the image of the Challenger Space Shuttle to remind us of heroes who died in glory.

Maybe that's at the heart of the popular view of memorializations. Memorials are commonly thought to be for heroes only. In our Nation's capital we have the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. We also have a long, black, granite wall inscribed with the names of 58,000 American Heroes who died in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Jan Scruggs, the Vietnam veteran who spearheaded the drive for the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, wrote a book about his quest called, "To Heal a Nation". The question of memorialization is probably best answered by that book title, "To heal ... a nation, a child, a parent, a brother, a sister, or a friend.

Psychiatrists tell us that fully one third of those seeking psychiatric therapy today are doing so because of some issue related to unresolved grief. Memorials are said to provide closure for a psychic wound and to aid in the healing process of grief.

This cemetery, and by extension this garden, is here to honor that healing need; to provide that vital link to the past, the present, and the future; and in so doing pay tribute to the everyday heroes sitting amongst us today.

That's right, the heroes amongst us today.

In a few short months the valedictorians of the high schools of America will stand on graduation day and speak for their generation. Many of these future leaders, when asked who their role models are - who their inspirations are - will say Mom and Dad. So you see, parents are heroes.

And there are other kinds of heroes. Because no matter who you are, tragedy can strike without warning, as it did just a few weeks ago to one of our most famous and beloved Americans.

Ennis Cosby was driving down a lonely highway in California when he apparently had car trouble and was murdered for reasons as yet unknown. His father, Bill Cosby, famous for bringing laughter to us, was suddenly pressed into an unfamiliar role: commenting on a personal tragedy beyond comprehension. The world seemed to know what he would say about his loss. What can a parent say? What words could convey the feeling? What would he say?

What he said became a headline all over the world. Bill Cosby said of his son that, "He was my hero." So '" sons and daughters can be heroes; as can mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and next door neighbors.

This Garden of Memories exists to meet a timeless emotional need that cannot be intellectualized away. It is here to help heal hearts and spirits. It is here to provide a permanent record of an individual's name so that love ones can visit and reflect. These memorials around you are not designed to be monuments to tragedy, but rather permanent markers to celebrate lives.

In the end maybe this garden is really just a special kind of mental photo album that we come to and open from time to time, so that we can examine those personal memories locked deep within us. When we leave this cemetery perhaps we are just closing that mental album and leaving it in a sacred place, knowing it is perpetually looked after, and always available for that next time that we need to look deep within ourselves and remember a love offering not to a dead body, but a living spirit.

In closing, perhaps the best reason to memorialize was stated over 100 years ago by British Prime Minister William Gladstone: "Show me the manner in which a Nation or a community cares for its dead and I will measure exactly the sympathies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land, and their loyalty to high ideals."

This cemetery, this garden, and the thousands of memorials around us, are testaments to the loyalty we have to the ideal that every life is worth remembering.