Montage of Pure Grief Is Rejected As Memorial to Terrorism Victims

"We can't know your grief," said Thomas Luebke, the representative of the arts commission. "What we say here today in no way demeans your experience."

Several commissioners thought a national memorial to the ongoing plague of terrorism ought to be more abstract and timeless. "How far do you carry personal anguish?" asked Michael Turnbull, the representative of the Architect of the Capitol.

Lowenstein, 64, said in a telephone interview before the meeting that she began the sculpture the year after her son, Alexander, 21, was killed aboard Flight 103, which was blown up Dec. 21, 1988, killing 270 people. She has a younger son, Lucas.

"I started portraying myself, basically, as a mother whose child was murdered," she said, "and what the emotions are that accompany such an event."

During subsequent support group meetings with people who lost relatives on the flight, and via their newsletter, she met other women who agreed to pose for her.

She said the figures in the sculpture are not wearing clothes because each such victim of terrorism is reduced to the same level, regardless of skin color or economic status. "People are truly stripped to the core," she said.

She began the work in Mendham, N.J., where she and her husband, Peter, were then living. It now resides in a sculpture garden at the couple's Long Island home in Montauk, N.Y., where the public is invited to view it.

The figures, each weighing more than 200 pounds, have skeletons of welded steel and chicken wire, and are covered with a painted synthetic substance that resembles plaster bandages. She wants a bronze version to be cast and placed somewhere in Washington.

"It's our national capital," she said. "And although we have independent memorials to independent tragedies of terrorism, we really do not have one that encompasses all victims of terrorism."

Last October, Rep. Timothy H. Bishop (D-N.Y.), who is Lowenstein's congressman, introduced a bill calling for "Dark Elegy" to become a memorial in or around the District. The bill has been referred to a subcommittee.

The project would be funded with money Lowenstein said her family received from the Libyan government as compensation for the Lockerbie attack. She declined to say how much that was, but she said just the bronze casting would be "a multimillion-dollar undertaking."

In 2003, Libya pledged to pay $2.7 billion in compensation to relatives of Lockerbie victims in exchange for a formal end to an 11-year United Nations embargo.

"It's an incredible way of spending that money, that we are really not comfortable having to begin with," Lowenstein said.

She said she knows what she is attempting will be difficult. "But we cannot not try," she said.

She pointed out that although her project was underway for more than a decade, it was dedicated in 1991. The date: Sept. 11.