Meditations on the Empty Chair: The Form of Mourning and Reverie

This essay explores the use of the empty chair as a motif in recent memorials as part of the process of individual and group mourning. The most familiar application is the Oklahoma City National Memorial, but the motif of the empty chair has been used across time. Examples include the painting “The Empty Chair, Gads Hill, 9th June 1870,” which shows Dickens’ empty chair, and Barthes’ keeping his dead mother’s chair near his bed. Groups of chairs have been used in memorials not only in Oklahoma City, but also in the memorial for the destroyed Jewish Ghetto in Krakow, the installation of empty chairs in Bryant Park on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and in the temporary memorial to victims of the 2011 Christchurch Earthquake. The power of these memorials reflects the ability of the empty chair to evoke a sense of the loss of a person and to foster a state of reverie as one contemplates the loss and a person’s absence. Our experience of loss engendered by these empty chairs is not merely the experience of the loss of a person, or even of a group of persons; we also experience a sense of loss of a world that is now gone.