Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg’s In America Remember Three Years On
By: Roy R. Grinker
Date Posted: OCT 1, 2024
To highlight the complexity of memorial art and politics, the renowned scholar of memory James Young occasionally invokes the German artist Horst Hoheisel, who conjured up an idea for a kind of anti-memorial. Instead of building something new to memorialize the dead, he proposed, why not remove a physical object. The vacant space itself would then evoke loss and absence. Hoheisel wrote that a vacant space might be “…an invitation to passersby who stand upon it to search for the memorial in their own heads. For only there is the memorial to be found.”
For Hoheisel, a physical memorial is a cop-out; it relieves the burden of memory because the memorial does the work for us.
Most scholars and artists would likely disagree with Hoheisel’s position, arguing instead that the preservation of memory is always enhanced when scaffolded by something material. But I empathized with Hoheisel as I sat on the national mall on September 21 and 22, 2024, contemplating the absence of something monumental that had materialized and then was gone: the 701,113 flags that for two weeks in 2021 carpeted the national mall in Washington, D.C. in honor of those who died from COVID-19. The social action artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg conceived and installed the memorial. Between September 17 and October 3, countless visitors came to look, remember, and reflect, alone and with others, and compose written messages on flags they planted on the grounds adjacent to the Washington Memorial.
Now, three years after the installation was dismantled, Suzanne and her team of volunteers returned to the Mall for two days (September 21 and 22) to write down their memories of the installation and record oral histories.
The first thing I did when I got to the mall was to look at photographs of the installation on my phone. I needed to remind myself of what it looked like. It seemed easy to remember by looking at photographs, but only the shape of memory, not memory itself or the depth of feeling I experienced. The harder part was transporting myself back to those actual lived moments in September 2021.
First, I returned to the environment: the sun beating down, somewhat hot for late September, the thousands of flags flapping loudly in strong, warm winds. The impressive sound accentuated the size and gravity of what the installation was about and overshadowed any other sounds, paradoxically creating its own kind of solemn silence.
Next was the feeling of loss. There were my own losses. My entire family of origin – my mother, father, and sister – died during the pandemic, and though they did not die from COVID-19, the installation spoke to me more generally about grief.
I have walked or jogged through the National Mall dozens of times in the three years since the installation ended, but while the installation always comes to mind, this visit was different. We were there again to think about In America.
Suzanne and I spoke to a park ranger who was embarrassed because, he said, he had forgotten about her. But it came back now. He recalled looking out from the top of the Washington Monument, five hundred feet above ground, and seeing how the reflections of the sun made the white flags look as if they were silver. He said, “It’s so consoling to have somebody to sit and think about the lives that were lost, and then what is being done in place of those who have been lost. That was so consoling to me. That’s how I felt.”
Returning to the present, he added, “And you know what, that I feel bad that I forgot about you, but you know what, meeting you again, it’s just like, just like I said, it’s so consoling, you understand.”
For the ranger, the installation commemorated the collective; for many others, however, like the thousands of people who wrote and planted flags, the losses it denoted were both collective and individual.
A former volunteer named Jennifer came to the mall to write and talk about In America, but also to remember her “baby brother” John-John, who died of COVID-19 at the age of 30. John-John had Down Syndrome. He was non-speaking and had significant intellectual disabilities. She said, “I like it when I get the opportunity to talk about [John-John]. I have no fear about being forgotten, but for whatever reason, I have this fear of him being forgotten, and so I will talk about him as much as I possibly can.”
After John-John passed, Jennifer found support online from other mourners, and several came together in person to volunteer at In America and to participate in other forms of advocacy, such as fundraising and making gift baskets for front-line healthcare workers. John-John’s disability, she said, predisposed her to be an advocate, to fight to make things better in the world. Being a sister to John-John, she said, “made me kind.” “And I felt like him passing away, like I almost felt like that kindness was gone. It took a bit for me to find it again.”
Being at the site of the installation helped her to reflect on her own suffering. “I feel like it’s completely like, you know, just, I feel like I’ve broken into multiple pieces.”
She added that even when she drives near the Washington Monument she is reminded of her brother, and those memories are not only painful but comforting. The comfort is in keeping the memory of John-John alive. She does not seek a resolution. Indeed, she is critical of those who think one can move on beyond loss and stop talking about it.
Speaking about loss, she said, “[Many people] pretend like it’s not going to happen, and then one day it happens, and then we’re, you know, trying to put it all the pieces together, to try to, you know, bury this individual that we care about. And then after that, it’s like, oh, how are you doing? I’m so sorry for your loss. And then no one asks about them anymore, which is why I have every intention to talk about my brother.”
Jennifer echoes the wise words of the writer Pauline Boss, for whom closure is a myth and grief is an ongoing process. For Boss, there is no “getting over” grief. Instead, people learn to live with grief, whether by incorporating their deceased loved ones in their daily lives, as Jennifer does through advocacy and volunteer work, or by believing that their relationship to them transcends the living world, in that they are never truly “gone.”
As we sat on the mall talking about John-John, Jennifer acknowledged her own special grief, that the loss of a sibling for whom she would have been the primary caretaker in the future, was a double loss: the loss of a brother, and the loss of the caretaking responsibility she embraced. Those losses are perhaps the two pieces of herself she refers to when she says “I’ve lost some of those pieces [of myself], and I don’t know how to put them all back together.”
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We will never know if Jennifer would have articulated her special pain in the same way in another location. But she came to the mall intending to grieve. She wants to grieve and will continue to do so, whether the flags for the multitudes who died are planted in the ground or not, or whether the names of the dead are written in permanent marker or etched in stone. When she sees the National Mall, she sees her brother. And on September 21 and 22, we saw him too.