There should be more flowers

“There should be more flowers.”

I was standing outside the Capital Jewish Museum on May 21, 2026, having just sent my friend Katie a picture of the stone outside bearing the names and photographs of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, reading her response. It was my first time there since the night of the attack, the night that had ended, for me, with a long conversation with Yaron, and that, for Yaron, had ended. Period. I was supposed to be inside, at the memorial for this beautiful couple, on the one-year anniversary of their senseless murder. But two mysterious fire alarms had emptied the building. Two fire alarms, wailing without a purpose. One for each of them, as if the museum itself were in mourning.

So the building stood hollow. Outside, a handful of us lingered among the cop cars and fire trucks. The memorial outside stood nearly bare — a few flowers, a dozen or so stones, the wind pulling at all of it under a gray sky. People walked past, laughing. Unaware of what day it was. Unaware that someone who had been there the night of the shooting — one of the last people to speak to Yaron — was standing among them, looking at the same street but existing in a different reality.

How easy it is to forget. To forget that, one year ago, two very alive people were blissfully unaware that they were living their last day. May 21, 2025 is carved into me. For others, it is just a day. And even for those who care, it will eventually become one more antisemitic attack slowly swallowed by the long, terrible record of Jewish suffering. 

Maybe that’s all okay. Maybe the best way to bless the memories of Sarah and Yaron, engaged in life and forever wed in death, is just to be fully alive. But at the same time, there should be more flowers. More stones. More people who pause on a day in May and remember that two names on a plaque were once people who dedicated their lives to peace, only to have their own snuffed out by violence. We can’t hold it all. But we can pause. We can place a stone. We can leave a bouquet. We can say their names. Maybe that’s not nothing. Maybe that’s everything.