What Does It Mean to Tend a Memorial Site?
When Valarie Kaur returns to Renee Good's memorial in Minneapolis, she is not simply visiting a static monument. She is witnessing an active ecology of care. The last time she stood at this site, snow covered the ground. It had been only days since Renee Good was killed. The community had just begun to grieve. Kaur herself had been there on January 23rd—the day before Alex Pretti was killed. That temporal proximity matters: the two deaths are now woven into the same site, the same memory, the same shared wound.
When Kaur returns, the landscape has shifted completely. Snow is gone. Flowers bloom. But what strikes her is not simply the passage of time or the turning of seasons. It is the evidence of sustained human presence. The community has tended this space. They have planted. They have watered. They have placed Alex's portrait alongside Renee's. They have arranged words, tributes, objects. This is not passive mourning. This is active, embodied care repeated over months.
How Do Multiple Griefs Occupy the Same Space?
The memorial site functions as a container for layered losses. Renee Good was killed first. Then, within hours, Alex Pretti was killed. For Kaur—who was present the day before Alex's death—these two losses are temporally fused in her own body and memory. She carries both deaths in her witness. When she returns to the site, both are present. Both are held. Both are remembered.
This is not unusual in communities experiencing sustained state violence or systemic harm. Multiple losses accumulate. They do not replace one another; they accumulate. Alex's portrait doesn't erase Renee's. Instead, they exist together. "To be back here now and to see how Alex's portrait and words are alongside hers" (0:46s)—the word "alongside" is crucial. They are not competing for space or memory. They are companioned in grief.
For communities like Minneapolis, which has experienced repeated killings by police and state actors, this accumulated mourning becomes a literacy. Residents learn to hold multiple deaths at once. They learn to tend multiple sites. They learn to organize resistance and remembrance as a single practice, not two separate acts.
What Does Seasonal Change Mean for a Memorial?
Kaur marks the passage of time through sensory detail: thick snow then, flowers blooming now. This is not poetic flourish. It is documentation. Snow is a blanket, a marker, a deadening. Flowers are growth, open exposure, continuation of life. The site itself is alive in a different way. But the crucial insight is this: the community has not abandoned the site during winter. They have maintained it. They have come back repeatedly. They have chosen to tend it through a season of cold and hardship.
"It has changed so much, but it is still so bursting with love" (0:56s). This formulation is instructive. Change is acknowledged. The memorial is not frozen in time. But the core quality—love, care, presence—persists. The community has not moved on. They have deepened. They have integrated the memorial into their seasonal rhythm, their neighborhood practice, their ongoing relationship to grief.
This matters because forgetting is also a choice. In dominant U.S. culture, grief is often understood as something to "get over," to move past, to integrate into a narrative of personal growth or healing. But in communities shaped by ongoing loss, remembrance is a form of resistance. To keep tending a site, to keep showing up, to keep planting flowers—this is a statement: You matter. Your death will not be erased. We will not let the state, or time, or winter, or our own exhaustion silence your name.
How Does Collective Memory Differ from Individual Mourning?
Kaur does not mourn alone. She returns to a space where others have already gathered, tended, planted, witnessed. The memorial is not her private shrine. It is a commons. This is a crucial distinction. Personal grief can feel isolating and can, in some contexts, be pathologized or individualized (as in therapeutic frameworks that treat grief as a private emotional process). But collective mourning—especially mourning organized around state violence—is a political act.
When a community plants flowers at the site where someone was killed by police, they are engaging in a form of counter-narrative. They are saying: this death matters. This death will be held in the public sphere. This death will not be forgotten when the news cycle moves on. The flowers are not just beautiful; they are insurrectionary. They assert that beauty, care, and remembrance belong to the dead and to those who loved them, not to the state's capacity to control the narrative.
Kaur's role here is as a witness and as part of that collective. She is not the only one showing up. She is one person among many who have tended this site. Her return amplifies the witness—she documents it, she speaks it, she integrates it into her own spiritual and activist practice—but the labor of tending belongs to the whole community.
What Does It Mean to Fight and Resist Through Remembrance?
In the video description, Kaur writes: "Minneapolis knows spring follows winter. They are still fighting, still resisting. So will we." This is not metaphorical. Spring is not abstract renewal. It is the actual season that has arrived in Minneapolis. But it is also a teaching. Winter comes, and the community continues to tend. Spring comes, and the community continues to fight. Resistance and remembrance are not phases that pass. They are continuous, seasonal, renewable.
"They are still fighting, still resisting. So will we." The shift from "they" to "we" is also significant. Kaur is not positioning herself as an observer. She is positioning herself as part of the struggle. She will continue. She will show up. She will tend. She will resist.
This is where Kaur's concept of "Revolutionary Love" enters—though she does not name it explicitly in this brief moment. Revolutionary Love, as she has articulated in other teachings, is a love that sees injustice and responds with fierce commitment to the transformation of conditions. It is not sentimental. It is not passive. It is active, organized, sustained love that refuses to accept state violence as inevitable or unchangeable.
How Do We Practice Sustained Remembrance Without Burnout?
One of the implicit questions in Kaur's return is: how do we keep showing up? How do we maintain the work of tending, witnessing, resisting across seasons? How do we do this without becoming depleted?
The answer, implicit in the memorial site itself, is collectivity. One person cannot plant all the flowers. One person cannot come to the site every day. One person cannot carry the weight of the loss alone. But a community—a neighborhood, a city, a network of people who are connected by love or proximity or shared experience of harm—can distribute the labor. Some people come on one day, some on another. Some plant, some stand vigil, some speak, some write, some organize. The work is shared, and therefore sustainable.
Kaur's return is also a reminder that these works are not always linear. Winter closes in. The site is covered in snow. It might seem that the tending has stopped. But when spring returns, the community returns with it. The flowers bloom again. The site is alive again. This cyclical, seasonal understanding of grief work is radically different from the individualistic, linear models that dominate therapeutic culture in the U.S.
Where to Go From Here
If you are moved by this moment—by the idea of collective tending, of sustaining remembrance across seasons, of weaving multiple griefs into a shared memorial practice—the next step is to find where this work is happening in your own community. Kaur links to March Minnesota, an organization that coordinates resistance and remembrance in Minneapolis. Are there memorial sites in your city that need tending? Are there deaths that have been erased or forgotten? Are there communities already doing this work that you can join? Revolutionary Love is not a solitary practice. It requires showing up, repeatedly, with others, over time.
