Memorials

You see them all the time, along the roads and the highways; little crosses of wood or styrofoam, faded wreaths with ribbons hanging limply in the sun or fluttering in the dusty wind. Usually there are pictures or papers with writing, too small to read, and seemingly smeared by the weather. These expressions of loss, of grief and rage and pain are a memorial to some, to others perhaps a warning; something terrible happened here. It could happen to you, or it could happen here again. A wail in styrofoam and crinkled note paper in an otherwise silent landscape, a tragedy that 20 years ago in our culture would have gone unmarked, grief invisible to passersby.

But for some of us, certain landscapes will never be the same. Marked or unmarked they harbor the intensity of memory, the echoes or ghosts of misfortune, a reminder of something precious wrenched loose from loving hands.

I was in the crowd at the rally at a pet store on 6th Avenue, showing support for the woman who was raped there. Her fiancé spoke, and her council woman. There was a representative from RAAP and other community activists. Many in the crowd held up signs and most of us chanted back at the places where they paused for us, perhaps a little too predictably. There were a lot of rally veterans in the crowd.

I approached a local tv journalist and asked her how many other open rape cases are being investigated right now by the Denver Police Department, other than this high profile case. It occurred to me that there was probably somewhere in that crowd at least 1 woman who had been sexually assaulted who didn’t get a rally, or a call from her council woman, or flowers from a stranger, and I wondered how she felt. She nodded and smiled. I faded back into the crowd. It was a nice rally, and I’ve been to a few.

But what about those other rapes? What about the ones committed when we don’t have a national sports event in town, or those committed against the most vulnerable, the homeless or prostitutes, those committed in the poorer parts of town?

There have been serial rapists in Denver since before it became Denver, you can count on it. The same is true for every other city you’ve ever lived in. How many pieces of our urban landscape mark silently for some woman a site of unspeakable loss and rage?

Maybe we should mark those places like roadside accidents, memorials to our grief and rage. Women could set out markers, memorials wherever it had happened, however long ago. You remember where it happened, don’t you? Whether it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago, even if it was a lifetime ago. You remember the apartment building, the office building, the alley the warehouse, don’t you? Maybe you pass it sometimes if you still live in the city, or when you come back to visit. Especially if you’ve moved on in your life, you don’t even mention it to your new friends. Only for you the landscape screams. Quietly.

Imagine. Suddenly the city would be peppered with them. Unburdened seeds of grief like painful peas beneath the mattresses of time would suddenly sprout, flowers of outrage blooming across our city, words finally finding form. “A woman was raped here 1979.” If you’ve never forgotten, would it be less painful to remember? Our truth would rise to the surface like secrets written in lemon juice becoming visible under heat.

Even namelessly our pain would be named, our losses honored, our truth told. We would see that we weren’t alone. In some places our silent screams may form a chorus, a deadly curve in the city where the lives of many women have spun out of control. It might be time for a guard rail here and there. It might be time for a different route.

I like this organic trend toward spontaneous personal expression, a move away from the organized, the controllable, the predictable. I think we should take it into our own hands, memorialize, honor our pain and warn others of treacherous stretches of the road.