2 weeks Ago
OKLAHOMA CITY — Nanny Joann Speers sits by the Reflecting Pool of the Oklahoma City National Memorial. A baby carriage, where her 10-month-old charge sleeps, sits within arm’s reach. “It’s so peaceful,” Speers, 72, said on a cool April morning.
“She takes her best naps here. We sit here a lot.” With high-rises in the background, whirring city buses rumble down North Harvey Avenue, breaking the cadence of the heavy machinery that serves as the elevator music of urban life.
But the sounds and sights of the city quickly melt for anyone who walks through one of the Gates of Time. The Oklahoma City Memorial is a sacred place. Holy ground.
“It’s so beautiful and quiet,” said Shannon Cornette, visiting a few weeks ago from Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. “It’s peaceful.” People are also reading.
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The stark Survivor’s Wall, the only remaining original portion of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, where now are inscribed the names of 600 survivors, many injured in the explosion of April 19, 1995. The Reflective Pool, which despite flowing water allows visitors to see a mirror image of themselves, perhaps seeing someone changed forever by what happened on these grounds.
“It is sacred ground,” Speers said. “It absolutely is sacred ground. People for the most part treat it that way.
“The longer I’m here, the more I appreciate the water, the trees, the crews that maintain it.” When the memorial was dedicated on the five-year anniversary of the bombing, the gospel hymn “Holy Ground” was played. It will be played again Saturday for the 30-year anniversary remembrances.
The memorial remains somber soil. It’s more than an enchanted garden or a mystical oasis. The memorial does not transport you.
It transforms you. In a recent presentation in Oklahoma City, Donna Bucella, a former U.S.
attorney who was dispatched to Oklahoma City to oversee the Department of Justice’s criminal investigation of the bombing, talked of tip-toeing around the Murrah Building rubble because it was a “gravesite.” But the memorial today is not a gravesite. “It was never designed to be a cemetery,” said Kari Watkins, who in 1996 became the first employee of the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum and now is its president and CEO.
“It was designed to be an outdoor classroom, where we would teach the senselessness of violence and you would see the impact of people’s actions.” Watkins’ words, practiced after three decades of trying to explain the unexplainable, crystallize some of the emotions people feel when they walk through those Gates of Time. “The senselessness of the loss,” Watkins said.
“The loss didn’t have to be. This place didn’t have to be here.” That’s the thing.
The 3.3-acre patch of serenity in downtown Oklahoma City could have been just another stretch of urban concrete with the Murrah Building and Northwest Fifth Street and parking spaces and people scurrying to get somewhere. Instead, the memorial grounds are a place not to go but a place to pause.
A place to reflect and remember. Teenager Toree Grimsley, visiting from Indianapolis, said seeing the four-story Gates of Time — labeled 9:01, the minute before the bombing, on the east end of the memorial and 9:03, the minute after the bombing, on the west end — “makes you just stop.” And stop you do.
Visitors come from around the globe, and locals come to reflect. Come to find hope and peace. Some just stroll, a respite from that urban cadence, and some take a seat, perhaps to eat a sack lunch or to chat with friends or even strangers, or to just think about why this place exists.
“These were Americans who went to work that day,” Watkins said of the 168 killed, represented by those empty chairs. “They did not go to war; they went to work. And they didn’t come home.
” In March, Kay Warren, who with her husband, Rick Warren, co-founded California’s Saddleback Church, visited the memorial. Watkins watched Warren lay her hand on each chair. “What that space meant to her, I think, was sacred ground,” Watkins said.
“Holy ground.” On the north side of the memorial is the former Journal Record Building, which now houses the museum portion of the memorial. Some people connected with the bombing never have darkened the door of the museum.
They’re not ready. Speers is not ready. She has heard some of the audio recording of the Water Resources Board meeting from that fateful day.
She’s heard the explosion. She doesn’t want to hear it again. “I’ll just stay out here,” Speers said, where trees bloom and waters ripple, where symbolic chairs shine day and night, where babies sleep and visitors come to stand on holy ground.
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