Snowflake Memorial is now our history [final update]

It has been a long road. Von Maur said Monday that it will hold a brief ceremony Thursday, then open the doors at 10 a.m. The ceremony will be held by the store's first-floor inside mall entrance. There are mixed emotions but generally people are relieved.  The last 14 days have been surreal, we need to take the next step in the healing process. Only those Von Maur employees who wish to return to work will be there. I am sure they will be warmly greeted by hundreds of ordinary people needing to show their support just one more time for them and the Von Maur family.

And what of the Snowflake Memorial? Follow me below the fold and into history.

Tomorrow morning clergy from Omaha will bless the Memorial and then the public has been invited to help disassemble and catalog the thousands of snowflakes, notes and remembrances left behind.

The snow flakes and words of sorrow and encouragement cover the doors, so managers knew something had to be done. But they'll be removed with care and compassion.

“They're going to carefully remove all these bits of love and memorabilia and it's our mission to restore them, keep them safe and see that they're packaged properly and preserved," says Betty Davis of the Douglas County Historical Society.

That means every single snow flake will be carefully taken down and placed in acid-free tissue paper, then layered into plastic tubs. Puffy snow flakes will even be stored so they don't lose their shape. Stuffed animals will be packed so they'll stay fluffy for years.

"It's basically so that there's no acid content, that way the papers that you see will not eventually be destroyed, these can be kept for years," says Davis.

It hasn't been decided how or if these memorials will be displayed again one day, but until then, they'll be stored with the same amount of care in which they were made.

"Because the memories that are here are really treasures and the persons who brought them had some way and some need of expressing their concern to all of the citizens, but especially to the families who were most directly affected and that's why we treasure those memories and we must take care of them and that's why we'll package them carefully and with love just as they were given," says Davis.

History is an interesting thing. I said in one of the other Snowflake diaries Omaha is far from perfect. Our history hasn't been one we can look back on with pride. The city is named for the Omaha tribe, the most powerful of the plains tribes, we crushed them. As we grew so did the corruption until we were known as "Little Chicago".  Our last lynching was in 1919, a likely innocent black man named Will Brown. Even today we are the beautiful city with the dark heart. Racist, unfeeling toward the poor and vulnerable. Our ghettos, black to the north and brown to the south, their schools ignored, the neighborhoods suffering from decades of neglect and inadequate city services.

On December 5th we were touched so deeply, so profoundly, we found our humanity. We have nurtured it, shared it and are better people because of it. We also have the opportunity to start a new history, a better history. We have had a very snowy winter so far and it looks like it will continue thru Christmas. I hope and pray when we are tempted to back slide, to not care, to say an unkind thing about another human being, those snowflakes will serve as a reminder that we are better than that. And at sometime hopefully in the not too distant future we will be able to visit the memorial, to be reminded of the time when our humanity held us together and got us thru, the time we started our new history.