Just over two months after the July 4th mass shooting at the parade in Highland Park, IL, over 6,000 hand-written messages of healing and hope flutter in the wind on tags left at the art installation memorial by the train tracks. The posts for the covered walkway have been wrapped in orange fabric and yarn. A desk, also orange, provides space for yarn for making bracelets or other mementos and pages of information. An classic phone creatively displays a QR code that will immediately direct your phone to call a call Congress to ask for sensible gun laws. An orange bowl on the desk holds cards reading “You Matter,” instructing visitors to “take one, give one.” Next to it, another orange bowl holds business cards reading “Enough #HPStrong,” with a number for calling Congress and the artist’s “Vote Tree” logo.
It didn’t start this way, with the wide swathes of orange. First in this space came the portraits of those killed by gunfire, portraits surrounded by the life of plants and the light of candles. Until a local artist, Jacqueline von Edenberg, decided to wrap the posts in orange, this town’s memorials to the lives that were ended by gun violence looked like so many others, and yet not, because this one was here, in my hometown. (I’ve written elsewhere about my experience at the parade).
I don’t know any of the seven people killed by gunfire personally, although I have since sat in a public group therapy session with bereaved family members. Perhaps because I am not personally connected to those who were killed, it’s the words in chalk that surround them that struck me first, the words on the brick walkway and on the cement walls. Words on the pillars. Calls for love and prayer and strength and action and an end to violence. The words drew me back to the site time and time again and I pointed my camera at the words.
The cement walls and metal pillars collected messages:
Ban assault weapons. Love is stronger than hate.
HP Strong. HP is Stronger Together.
Hate cannot drive out Hate, only Love can do that.
More action, less thoughts and prayers.
Painted rocks and stones collected messages.
“Never let fear win — love wins.”
“LF <3 HP,” said another, meaning Lake Forest loves Highland Park.
Pray + Art, said a printout taped to the post; “abolish guns; take action; ban assault weapons” read the message scrawled beneath.
The Art Installation
Then the site started to change. I walked past with my husband one evening and the posts were wrapped in orange; the space behind the framed photos of the deceased had been covered with orange strips of fabric.
“Is this all your work?” I asked the curly-haired woman holding a ball of yarn in her hands.
“Yes,” she said, “join in, take a ball!”
We were on our way to retrace our steps in Port Clinton Square, trying to figure out the steps we’d taken when the shots rang out. It wasn’t the right moment to join in a yarn-bombing effort, but I knew I’d be back.
Remembering in Port Clinton Square
Over in Port Clinton Square, the site of the shooting, the flowers and memorial items from Green Bay and Central had been moved to the map. The space here took on its own life as the streets opened up after the police barriers came down. People who felt able to do so came back in to see what it was like. You could still see where bullets had hit and where glass had shattered. People retraced their steps in a recognizable dance, walking, looking at the rooflines on the corner, gesturing, ducking, hiding, moving through the steps they’d taken. Musicians set up under the trees and among the replanted flowers. Chalk messages moved along the steps of the square, the steps where I’d stood. Messages came in from around the world, impermanently scrawled on the ground.
“So sorry for your losses, from England UK”
“With love from [nearby] Deerfield”
“With love from France”
As my husband and I walked, we continued to find messages of light and hope chalked on the ground. Someone quoted Baha’i writings over at the corner of First Street and Central Avenue: “So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth.”
At the foot of the stairs by the Walker Brothers Pancake House where some of the victims died, someone wrote in capital letters, “They must have their voices boosted too.” The stairs spelled out the messages, one stair after another, “We will heal. We must do better. We all deserve better.”
Huge block letters on the brick sidewalk through Port Clinton Square spelled out, “Believe in your power for good.” At the pile of flowers that covered the map of Highland Park in the center of the square, a laminated sheet had been taped to a menorah, reading “A little bit of light dispels a lot of darkness.”
In early August, about a month after the shooting, the city moved the memorial items again, out of recognition that some of the people most deeply affected could not return to Port Clinton Square to pay their respects, because their trauma and grief was too deep.
Remembering by the train tracks
Since then, the art installation memorial at the tracks has only continued to grow. Carpet samples on the cement borders offer soft places to sit. A desk suggests the meaning and purpose of the space. Signs from around the area have been moved there, including one from the synagogue my family attends, signed by everyone at the community’s vigil in the days after the shooting. It’s now getting smudged by rain and dirt.
At night the memorial comes alive with music and light; it feels welcoming. It feels like stepping into a space the likes of which we do not often experience in our separate and separated contemporary lives. There are crosses next to votive candles next to messages from Soka Gakkai International. There’s a mailbox to leave “cards for Cooper,” the young boy paralyzed by bullets in the shooting. There’s yarn and string and more messages in fuzzy chalk:
“One love.”
“Come [heart] create [heart] heal [HP] together.”
“Honor with action.”
And there are explanations: why orange?
As described on signs in the memorial: “Why orange? Orange is the color of the gun violence movement. In 2013, Hadiya Pendleton marched in President Obama’s second inaugural parade. One week later, she was shot to death in a Chicago playground. Hadiya’s friends commemorated her life by wearing orange, the color hunters wear in the woods to protect themselves and others.”
Von Edelberg noted in a recent Chicago Sun Times article that there are now more than 6,000 messages hanging from threads of orange yarn. She isn’t sure what will ultimately happen to the installation, but she—and those who, like me, find this space to be a balm and a blessing—know that the city is starting to think about changes, even as the city also plans to eventually create an official memorial. Not everyone who comes to the site finds it healing; others find the strong visual of the memorial triggering and traumatic in relation to what happened here in our town not so long ago and not so far away.
As the days move forward, the city, neighbors, and Von Edelberg are trying to figure out what comes next. Highland Park is not the only place thinking through these issues; Sandy Hook sorted through tens of thousands of teddy bears, and the work of remembering that memorialization is ongoing.
Words for healing
As one who believes strongly in the power of words to offer comfort and care, I find the memorial to be a balm and a blessing. I’m sensitive to the way the memorial can be traumatic to people, but I also believe that it’s important to face the difficult moments. To have this space simply vanish, or to have it diminished without warning, would be trauma as well, a sudden seizure of a place where many people have found meaning, and where they’ve done it in community and with connection.
Words can help to heal; words can lessen the sting, but words will never replace what was lost, either the lives of the seven people killed or a community’s memories of a sense of safety, or both. Words, art, and music get us part of the way there, too, but what I want is change. And not to be alone. If there’s anything these words and the space that holds them remind me, it’s that healing isn’t meant to happen in solitude, even though grief can feel like the loneliest of places.
I close these brief reflections and memories with images, so many images. These images speak to me of both the profound trauma, grief, and loss this community suffered, but also of hope. This space may be dense with grief, but it is also thick with the healing that comes from coming together.
