Remembrance Week 2014 Part 1 of 4

The women scream, grimace and tear at their hair. Some raise their hands to the sky while others bury their heads in their arms. Most have fallen to their knees but some have collapsed completely as if hoping they can disappear into the ground.

One moment of unimaginable grief captured forever in steel, wire, mesh and foam.

Or rather, 76 moments. Seventy-six lives changed forever on a December day in 1988 when a bomb ripped Pan Am Flight 103 out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing everyone on board.

Together the 76 sculptures create Dark Elegy, a memorial that depicts the exact moment when each of these women learned that their loved one had been killed. Some lost a husband. Others, a brother. Many lost a child, including the parents of 35 Syracuse University students on that flight who were returning from a semester studying abroad. The university honors and remembers the lives of these 35 students every year with a series of events called Remembrance Week, which starts on Monday.

Suse Lowenstein started Dark Elegy a month after the bombing killed her son, Alex Lowenstein, a 21-year-old SU student who loved surfing and the outdoors and was always a fan of his mother’s sculptures. Dark Elegy was a way for Lowenstein to work through her grief.

Courtesy of Suse Lowenstein

The Lowenstein family poses together in a family photo. The family’s oldest son, Alex, was 21 when he was killed in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

“The only way for me to keep sane was to use my hands and physically sculpt what I had experienced,” Lowenstein said.

The sculptures, which are larger than life size, are all of women, though that was never Lowenstein’s intent. When she reached out to Pan Am Flight 103 groups looking for people willing to model, only women responded. She attributes that to differences in the way men and women grieve. “Men grieve just as much but in a different way,” she said.

The coloring of the sculptures is significant too, with the most emotional statues portrayed in the lightest hues. All the women are also naked or, as Lowenstein prefers, unclothed.

“I intentionally portrayed every figure stripped because when an act of terrorism of the magnitude of Pan Am 103 happens, every person involved is stripped to the same level,” she said. “Everyone is the same at that moment and I thought, what better way to portray them than stripped, literally.”

She spent 15 years creating the memorial, spending a month or two on each sculpture, working first at her studio in Mendham, New Jersey and then at her home in Montauk, New York. The sculptures now reside in a sculpture garden behind the Lowenstein’s Long Island home, arranged in a circle 65 feet across. The memorial is open to visitors from 10 a.m. to noon every day and Lowenstein estimates that thousands of people have come to see the sculptures over the last 10 years.

Her granddaughter, Samantha Lowenstein, now a freshman at SU, remembers that the statues were always there when she went to visit her grandparents in New Jersey. She would watch her grandmother work on the sculptures and marvel at the amount of thought and effort put into them.

“It’s crazy how big it is,” she said. “It’s really incredible to look around and think ‘these are all people that were affected.’”

Before the memorial grew too large to transport, Dark Elegy was exhibited at various places in the New York and New Jersey area. The sculptures have come to campus three times, first in 1995, then in 1998 and finally in 2008. In 1998, Lowenstein had made about 40 sculptures and 35 of those were set up on the lawn in front of Lyman Hall on campus.

Courtesy of Suse Lowenstein

The sculptures in Dark Elegy are made out of wire, mesh, foam and steel.

Judy O’Rourke, director of the Office of Undergraduate Studies in Academic Affairs, who oversees the Remembrance Scholars program, remembers looking at the sculptures in front of Lyman and feeling overwhelmed.

“It’s a tremendous expression of grief and pain,” she said. “I’m a mother and you can’t ever understand that but you can try and put yourself in someone else’s shoes and think about how you would feel.”

While looking at the sculptures one day in 1998, O’Rourke recalls meeting a couple who had lost a loved one in an accidental plane crash. They too were moved by Dark Elegy and had experienced a similar grief.

“It just resonates with people,” O’Rourke said.

Lowenstein still hopes to find a permanent home for the memorial, one where people from all over the world can come and see the sculptures. Once a permanent location is found, Lowenstein and her husband will pay to cast the entire memorial in bronze, so it will endure over time.

In 2008, the sculptures came close to finding a permanent home when the National Capital Memorial Advisory Commission considered Dark Elegy as part of its search to find a national monument to honor terrorist victims. But the commission ultimately rejected the statues, saying their nudity might offend some people or leave them liable to vandalism.

The commission also told Lowenstein that the memorial was too specific to Pan Am Flight 103 and they were looking for a “more generic” monument.

“Frankly, that was just something I so disagree with because there’s truly nothing generic that’s left behind after an act of terrorism,” she said. “Truly nothing generic at all.

“I have a feeling that Dark Elegy was just too truthful.”

Published on October 20, 2014 at 12:54 am

Contact Jessica: jliannet@syr.edu | @JessicaIannetta