The Memorial

I hope that sometime in your lives, you all have a chance to visit the Oklahoma City Memorial and Museum. It is a place you can spend a couple of hours and your life will never be the same. I went there 6 years ago as a random stop on a road trip. I returned to run a marathon that supports it.

Why is this place so special?
As I walked through the museum and heard the stories of the park ranger at the site, I realized why. It’s not just the symbolism of everything from the Empty Chairs to the landscaping. It’s the stories of the individuals and the experience of the day that is captured.

You start in a room hearing the recording of a hearing that was happening in a building across the street. It’s ordinary events. The kind of things that my sister and friend (both lawyers) hear every day. And then you hear the blast and see the 168 victim’s faces shine on a wall. A door opens to the aftermath. Did I mention the museum is in a building that suffered some damage from the explosion? You see that damage too.

There were many things that stood out to me on this walk through a day in history. The first was the display cases filled with objects recovered from the blast. There are watches, keys, briefcases, toys from the daycare center. An entire display case full of keys. Car keys, office keys, house keys. They sit in a pile, with one key pulled out and hung above the rest. The keys belonging to one of the victims. Ordinary objects from what turned out to be an extraordinary day, a minute in time. Objects made significant by the loss of life of their owners.

And it continues through the museum. Video clips of the survivors and their stories. Parents taking about dropping their kids off at daycare mere minutes before…never to see them again. People who were pulled from the building by rescue workers. Stories so individual, in a tragedy so big.

You can’t help but feel a part of it as you go through this museum. I challenge anyone not to be touched by the cards and letters sent by children all over the country in the days after. One, rainbow colored card in child’s handwriting read simply: “Get Well.”

Perhaps the most difficult room in the museum is the room for the victims. Each person has a small box with their name, picture, and objects to represent them left by the families. Ordinary people. People whose faces inside, and empty chairs outside stand as testament to the impact a single life can have on so many. 168 individual lives. Thousands who wish their chairs did not stand empty. A community that has gathered, worked and loved through their suffering to make sure their lives are remembered, and that the legacy those 168 people left is somehow greater than the senseless act of violence that took them from this earth.

I left the museum and the memorial, for the second time, moved by the power of our lives and the power of love to transcend the most unspeakable acts of evil. We may never “Get well,” from the sickness and brokenness, the loss and the tragedy in our lives, but we can choose to hope beyond it. We can choose keep loving, and keep honoring the lives of those who have touched us and left us, with our own acts of love and kindness, passion, compassion, and hope. The stories of these people, and the symbols of their legacies reminded me that we are all, with our ordinary lives, called to be extraordinary symbols of love and hope for each other. We are called to cry tears, run races and stand in quiet, and most of all remember. Remember that senseless acts of violence can never erase legacy of one life as long as we are willing to gather, to remember, and to allow extraordinary grace to transform our brokenness into our own legacies of love.