A Euology for Yorkville

It is never easy to write a eulogy. Eulogies are part of the closure process. How do you sum up so much in so few words? There is the pain you feel about the loss of someone you love, the joy you feel about having known this person, and your complicated feelings on life and death. Eulogies are not easy to write because there's so much going on. And so, you try your best, usually while still experiencing the pain of loss. The character of this pain varies depending on how and when this person died – whether the death was expected or unexpected, whether the person was young or old, whether they died peacefully or not. One way or another, for better or for worse, eulogies get written. They get written because they are part of the funeral ritual. We write and read eulogies for people just as we are born, live, die, and life goes on. It's all a cycle. Funerals and eulogies accompany death, and so like death, they are inevitable. We get closure and life goes on. We do this because it is natural.

As hard as it is to write a eulogy for a person, it is even harder to write a eulogy for a place we hold dear. Places are symbols. They provide continuity. They are the set of our lives. They add meaning to our lives and serve to hand meaning from one generation and one group to another. Over time, they become sacred. Unlike with people, we do not expect places to go away except in the most dire of circumstances. And in those circumstances, war, terrorist attack, tragic fires, earthquakes and other natural disasters, the trauma and enormity of the event itself becomes a symbol equal to the original symbol. As sore as we may be that our original symbol was lost, the new symbol holds the place of the old one. And we can either leave the space untouched, reconstruct the old place, or rebuild anew, while knowing what happened in that place. There are examples of this everywhere. For instance, the White House was destroyed by the British, and rebuilt. It maintained its importance and grew in stature. The Schloss of Heidelberg was left in ruins, but is still as meaningful as a place as was the intact castle. And the site of the World Trade Center will be built upon again. Likewise, all the places destroyed by great natural disasters such as the tsunami of 2004 will be rebuilt. But we know why. All these places hold great historical meaning. They are meaningful to so many people in so many ways. And so, often, when a place is destroyed, there is a reason for that destruction equal to the meaning of the original place. And the whole process is important and meaningful. Ultimately, as sad as it is to lose the place, in these situations, the circumstance is huge enough to overshadow the loss of the place and provides closure to the meaning of that original place. Likewise, it opens a new chapter in the meaning of those places – it changes their meaning.

Given the importance of places as symbols, though, we do not want to simply destroy a place without closure. That is, we do not want to destroy a symbol and put something new and alien in its place that does nothing to acknowledge the importance of the place that was destroyed. This offends the meaning of the original place. And it offends those to whom the place was meaningful. It goes against the dignity of places and symbols and those who hold those symbols. It degrades us as people. In circumstances like these, what are people to do? There is no symbol equal to the lost symbol to takes its place. There is no calamity to fill the void and create an understanding of the loss. There is simply a void, a memory. And in the place of the old meaningful symbol, there is the new thing. Those to whom the old symbol meant something tend to hate the new thing. The less the new thing tips its hat to the old symbol, the more profound the disregarding of the symbol, the more profound the utter debasement of what people hold to be sacred, the more people hate this new thing. And so this new thing breads anger. This is the natural and unfortunate reaction people have to the senseless destruction of sacred places. So, in a situation like this, what do people do to find the closure they yearn for? What if they are powerless to determine the fate of this place? How do we maintain the dignity of our places? How do we eulogize something, a place, we hold to be meaningful and sacred when it has been taken away from us and replaced with something that does not equal its meaning? In this case, we need one hell of a eulogy. This eulogy needs to take into account all the meaning of the old place, and it needs to ensure that the destruction of the old place is not in vain. It needs to ensure that somehow, even though the new place does not replace the meaning of the old place, the meaning of the old place somehow transcends its destruction. Somehow, somewhere, the meaning of that old place needs to be continued. And so, here is the eulogy of a sacred place…