The most emblematic monuments to the victims of terrorist bombings and mass shootings may be the city-storage rooms that house, in carefully labelled folders and acid-free boxes, the posters, letters, stuffed animals, and other items that people place in makeshift memorials at sites of violence. The city of Boston, which commemorated the fourth anniversary of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing on Saturday, oversees an archive of thousands of cards, banners, and other paper and cloth materials left at Copley Square after five people were killed and more than two hundred wounded in the attacks; it stores larger items outside the city, including thousands of pairs of pristine running shoes, purchased specifically for the temporary memorial. Few people have asked to see the items in person, a city archivist told me, maybe because the collection is digitized and posted online.

Until Sunday, when the news came that Boston would create a series of permanent memorials to the attack, the plan to keep these informal remembrances in perpetuity amounted to the city’s only material monument. Now, however, the city has announced a pair of obelisks at the two bombing sites, to be completed next year, and a larger, as-yet-undetermined memorial, to be completed by 2020. Two years ago, when Boston’s Mayor Martin Walsh designated the anniversary of the attack as “One Boston Day,” he equivocated on the likelihood of an official, permanent memorial. “It’s really not up to me,” Walsh said. “It’s up to the families and the victims and the survivors.” He continued, “If we want to have a memorial, we will work to have a memorial, and if they feel One Boston Day, or another way of honoring the memories of their loved ones who were hurt that day—we’ll do that.” It’s probably the closest an elected official can come to suggesting that a city that suffered an attack may not need a memorial after all.

In Boston, the victims’ families appear to want one, and the city is making good on the promise to follow their lead. For the past year, the families of the five people killed at the marathon have been meeting with city officials to help them develop their plans; they selected Pablo Eduardo, a sculptor in Gloucester, Massachusetts, to design the obelisks. This summer, the city will hold a series of public meetings to collect feedback on the larger memorial. Notably, these plans and meetings have been held within a small circle, excluding even many of those injured in the Boston Marathon attacks. Last week, I spoke to Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost her left leg below the knee and is one of seventeen who lost a limb. Haslet-Davis speaks regularly about recovering from the trauma of that day, and, in 2016, she ran the Boston Marathon wearing her prosthetic blade. She follows news among survivors closely, she told me, and was “very offended” that Boston wasn’t working on a permanent memorial. “We need somewhere where we can go and mourn, and know that our city hasn’t forgotten,” she said. The city said that it consulted with representatives of some survivor groups as it developed its plans, and that, on April 24th, it will begin a process to hire a consultant to organize public meetings about the larger memorial. “The issuance of the R.F.P. for a consultant is the first step of an effort that will evolve over the next three years, that includes a four-month-long public-engagement process to be open and inclusive of everyone and maximize access to participation,” said Nicole Caravella, the press secretary to the mayor’s office.

There are many reasons why cities are ambivalent about memorials these days. “There is always a politics to public memorialization,” said David Blight, a professor of American history at Yale University, who writes frequently about memorials. “But terrorism is particularly difficult,” he added, because there is no agreed-upon story to tell about it. This past November, on the first anniversary of the attacks in Paris that killed a hundred and thirty people, officials unveiled small plaques at each of the three bombing sites, held a moment of silence, and read victims’ names. They delivered no original speeches, nor did they offer interpretations of what the violence might mean. New York City officials have followed a similar script for nearly sixteen years. At annual commemorations of the 9/11 terror attacks, they join victims’ families to read victims’ names and mark moments of silence; on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, politicians read old poems, Bible passages, and an address by Abraham Lincoln rather than pen original remarks interpreting the meaning of the day.

The practice of memorializing by recognizing victims’ names has roots in Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, a wall of black granite inscribed with the more than fifty-eight thousand names of the U.S. service members killed in Vietnam. The wall, which created an uproar when it was first unveiled, in 1982, invited people to participate in remembrance either by looking up the location of a particular name or by simply noticing one’s reflection in the black granite. Now its success has made it the standard for other memorials. “Everyone wants to do another one like that,” said Christine Boyer, a professor of architecture at Princeton University.

The process of determining the memorial is often far more divisive than the result. The World Trade Center memorial—two square pools inscribed with victims’ names marking the footprints of the Twin Towers—is now relatively uncontroversial, but its planning was plagued by conflicts. Officials struggled to include everyone affected by the attacks in the design process. Many survivors and downtown residents felt that their voices were overpowered by the voices of victims’ families. There were arguments among victims’ families, too: some families of first responders wanted their loved ones commemorated separately from the others, to honor their heroism, which suggested a hierarchy that upset other families.

But, even with such conflicts, the urge for permanent, physical memorials persists, regardless of whether their execution proceeds slowly and with ambivalence. In September of 2013, Newtown, Connecticut, assembled the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial Commission, comprised of twelve city residents, to create a memorial to the twenty-six adults and children killed in the December, 2012, shooting at an elementary school. The commission spent the next three years collecting feedback and struggling to determine a proper location for the memorial (during which time the town demolished and rebuilt the school); it’s only now turning to the design. This past November, in Orlando, Florida, five months after a gunman killed forty-nine people at the Pulse night club, the city purchased the club to oversee its transformation into a public memorial; a month later, the club’s owners backed out of the deal, prompting some residents to call upon the city to acquire the club through eminent domain, a move officials said they would not make. Officials say they hope to work with victims’ families and the club’s owners to create a permanent memorial. In the meantime, people continue to bring homemade memorials to the club, which the Orange County Regional History Center has begun to collect and preserve.

Adrianne Haslet-Davis told me she doesn’t have any illusion that a memorial will provide closure for her, nor is closure a word she puts much stock in; she doesn’t think it’s possible to make sense of the bombings. “It wouldn’t make my life better,” she said, of a memorial. Rather, “it would be a place where I could go and be able to sit with my service dog and cry or just sit in silence,” she said. When Haslet-Davis wants to do these things now, she walks to a stretch of sidewalk on Boylston Street, near the Boston Marathon finish line, and simply sits down. People step around her and give her strange looks until someone inevitably connects the location with her prosthetic leg and takes her picture. Haslet-Davis hopes that the city manages a future permanent memorial as it managed the makeshift memorial at Copley Square nearly four years ago. At designated moments, the city closed the area filled with banners, stuffed animals, American flags, and pairs of tied-together sneakers, to allow survivors and victims’ families some time away from the crowds. “Yes, there were people taking pictures from outside,” she said, “but it was a place to go.”