Most tragedies have a geographic center. When Michael Brown was murdered the community took its grief to Canfield Drive and built a memorial. When Kobe Bryant was killed, thousands gathered at Staples Center and built beautiful shrines. After 9/11, people turned the fences around the World Trade Center and the Pentagon into beautiful walls of remembrance.

But a pandemic has no geographic center. So we are offering a space for Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley to use as a memorial to the losses we have all experienced. We call it a Throughline – because it is a collection of lines on which anyone in the community-at-large can hang remembrances that will be an expression of the loss, the grief, the exhaustion, and the anger that we all share.

Thanks to the construction brilliance of Eddie King and the artistic imagination of the All Saints Church creative group, this Throughline is now standing at the southwest corner of All Saints Episcopal Church Pasadena. All Saints will officially launch Throughline with a brief service following the 11:15 a.m. service on Sunday, August 29.

All are invited to come and write anything that is their lament on a piece of paper and hang it. Pictures, names, thoughts, prayers — anything. Our hope is that this Throughline will be a scaffolding for expression that will grow in ways we can’t even imagine, enabling us to speak and cry our pain … which is always the first step toward its healing.