Maybe this is done out of cruelty. After all, the deceased’s ghost would have to run at a pretty fast clip to keep up with his memorial, eh?
So, I gotta ask - has anyone ever seen this done for pets? That could get rough:
**In Memory of
Skippy
Fluffy
Rex
Killer
Prissy
Mr. Snuggums
etc
etc
**
I’m glad you brought this up, because I’ve seen one or two of these and I wondered if I was losing my faculties. Okay, so these people are really driving around with memorials to dead relatives on their back windows, huh?
And I agree, they weren’t on any kind of car I’d wish to be riding around in.
Anyway, I’m really, really glad to know that I’m not the only one who has seen this phenomenon. I was kind of worried.
I’ve never seen any of this and I’m in Lawrence, just outside KC.
There is one girl that has a Jeep with BIG PIMPIN across the front of the windshield.
Snip
Emphasis mine.
This was written by a think-tank in England. I can only wonder what they would write about the RIP Dad window decals hit their country.
It’s common here in northeast Texas, as are the various forms of #3 shrines (although I don’t think I’ve ever seen both on the same car). And “Terrorist Hunting Permit” stickers (which do share the Earnhardt demographic).
Some of the “In memory of…” ones even have Calvin kneeling in front of a cross. The Calvin sticker’s also popular as a standalone, which amuses me to no end. Isn’t “thou shalt not steal” (which would seem to cover copyright infringement) somewhere in the Bible?
In addition to the sheer tackiness of it all, I always get a sense of low rent grandiosity from the car window memorials. I live on Long Island (NY – near NYC, for anyone who doesn’t know), and these things have absolutely metastasized all over the place since 9-11. The September 11 ones are legion, and appear to me to be an expression of honest grief, an exhortation to never forget, and a (somewhat less noble) way of saying “LOOK AT ME! MY DEAD PERSON WAS MUCH MORE TRAGIC AND VALUABLE THAN YOUR NON-9-11 VICTIM DEAD PERSON,” making the driver some sort of a necro-celebrity by proxy. (I’m bracing myself for a barrage of invective here.) Although they are certainly harmless, assuming that they don’t impair the driver’s ability to see out their rear window; and I assume that they give the driver some kind of positive feeling (which is never a bad thing), they seem a wee bit cheesy to moi. FWIW, I express my own mourning (for an AIDS victim, not a 9-11 victim) by planting special trees and plants (not with memorial placques – the plants themselves are the memorials, and no one else need know why they are there) and donating to appropriate charities.
I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing, but I notice a lot of car-window-tributes with Spanish names on them. I suspect it may be based in some kind of tradition of public memorialization, because I never saw a whole lot of roadside shrines to commemorate car accidents until the Spanish population here started going up some years ago. I suspect it branched out from there. Alternately, it could be based in the memorial graffitti walls that one sees in NYC. Pretty much everything that starts there ends up here in pretty short order.
Last question – assuming that the mobile tribute on the car is not just a removable decal, what the hell are you supposed to do when the car dies? Remove the rear window? Give it a Viking funeral? I would think seeing “In Memory Of Mom” headed off to the car crusher on the back of a tow truck would be a little disheartening.
I’m still seeing a lot of white ‘lno’ memorial stickers in the back windows of the same make pickup truck that lno was murdered for. The guy belonged to a pickup truck club and was murdered specifically for his truck, so the club members started putting these stickers in their back windows. From my memory, this seems to be the local start of the “white memorial sticker in the back window of your vehicle trend”. I don’t remember seeing them before 1995, but like elmwood said, they are everywhere. Not as many 9-11 stickers anymore, but more and more Spanish phrases (no idea what they mean).
Not our ‘lno’ - “larry neal oliver” - famous local murder case. (I almost ended up on this grand jury! There was FAR more to the case than the article alludes to, and, oh yeah, read the last line of the article itself. IMHO, what a yutz.)
Well, I haven’t seen rear-window memorials here in Toronto. Yet. I suppose it’s only a matter of time now… Roadside memorial spots are fairly common. The peeing-Calvin stickers seem to have come and mostly gone; they aren’t nearly as common as they used to be.
“Necro-celebrity”? Brilliant word.
And the F-350 who wasn’t compensatin’? Methinks he wasn’t feeling so confident, or he wouldn’t be protesting so loudly… 
Especially if you own an ant farm.
Oh, I’m sure they’re on the way. I saw my first memorial T-Shirt last week on a shopping trip in Buffalo (from Hamilton). It literally made my head turn… and made me feel a little uneasy, in a socially-awkward kind of way.
I haven’t seen the window memorials, but our local newspaper regularly publishes memorials on the anniversary of peoples’ death bought and paid for by their families. Weird. I find them quite disturbing for some reason I can’t put my finger on.
I suppose I should chime in since I have one on my car.
In a Mustang club I belong to, a fellow member was killed in a car accident while driving his Cobra. In memory of him, our members placed small decals on our Mustangs that simply reads “Andrew ***** 1979-2002”. The cars brought us together so they are in a way a memorial.
Ralph Whatnot’s dead?!
Jesus, I didn’t even know he was sick . . .
This may have been mentioned, but in the small-town print media, this is how they make their money.
There is no longer any “call” to cover a “major” news story because the audio/video media has the market on that, so guess what? The local paper concentrates on “fluff”: donations, local sports, weddings, obits, political races, ribbon cuttings, court-reports and, you guessed it, “In Memoriams”.
I have absolutely no problem with any of the above except the “In Memoriams”. They consist mostly of 1/4 page poetry or prose designed to (well, what?) keep that loved one in everyone’s memory. Even those who did not know him/her.
Meh. I’m ambivalent about it. In Germany the local papers carry little 1/16th blocks of “In Memory Of” ads too, but IMHO, it is more tasteful this way than the stuff printed in our local newspapers, which can be some really lengthy stuff and makes you wonder why it was necessary.
Dude, if I die, and I mattered to you or you loved me, it’s enough for me if you keep me in your thoughts. Drink a beer or smoke a fattie in my honor sometime. It’s not necessary for you to immortalize my sorry ass in print.
Thanks
Q
Quoth Eve…
Quote:
Originally Posted by FairyChatMom
Lately I’ve been seeing cars with custom cutouts on the back windows saying:
In Memory of
Ralph Whatnot
June 3, 1943 - August 15, 1999
Ralph Whatnot’s dead?!
Jesus, I didn’t even know he was sick . . .
** Oh Huzzah! That was amusing!
Just tell me where to send the bill for the keyboard, or tips on removing coffee from same. **
I loving this mental image of a ghost sticking his tongue out and saying: “Neener! Neener! Neener! Everyone thinks you’re a nutter!” No disrespect intended towards your father FCM but it’s just a really visual image.
As for my own father, if I did something like this, he’d come back from the grave and give me THE LOOK! It was too scary in real life, I can’t even imagine what it’d be like from beyond the grave. :eek:
The tshirts have become somewhat popular here too. The mall on Saturday is becoming a walking graveyard. The memorials in the newspaper are very popular. Some even run to a half page in size. Oh and let us not forget the ever increasingly popular three and four column obituaries that list every minute detail of the dearly departed’s life. Fascinating reading there.
One other little note on memorializing. We have had to ask people at work not to put signs up on their office doors or in their offices memorializing their loved ones. Customers do get a little creeped out by such things.