I dislike them, because they are a distraction, as others have mentioned. Especially if there’s freaking photos and teddy bears and bicycles and motorized Santas and water slides and such.
If I had just lost a loved one to an auto accident, the LAST thing I’d do is make anything that might have even a tiny, remote chance of helping repeat the same type of tragedy I’m grieving about. What horrific irony. Sort of like making a 21-gun salute for a shooting victim, using real bullets shot straight up into the air.
I’m OK with very simple things, like a cross or whatever.
Yeah…so your bereaved relatives can play it over…and over…and over…while falling to the bottom of a gin bottle, playing your favorite song…while they’re wearing your favorite bathrobe. Fuck! Just kill me!
After my mother died, my stepfather kept her voice on the answering machine for over a year–and she had lost her voice to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis nine monthe before she died. I kind of understand why he did it, but it was damned creepy calling the house and hearing her voice, when every fibre in my body was screaming, “she’s gone she’s gone she’s gone”…
[QUOTE=Gary T]
You’re kidding, right? Close your eyes, or turn your gaze away from the side of the road? It’s a roadway, meant for driving on. It’s not meant to be a place to erect memorials. Everyone had better be looking at everything around them. “Don’t look at it” is not sane advice for drivers.
Relax, I meant if you see something on the side of the road and it’s obviously not a pedestrian, a cyclist, a deer, or any other hazardous being, IGNORE IT and carry on.
Or better yet, the shrine can be erected on private property so I don’t have to deal with the visual pollution, costly accidents, or gaper’s blocks caused by an overzealous person’s need to practice “in your face” christianity on the public roadway I’m paying for.
I found this thread because I was going to start a conversation about this very topic. The above contributors have done a great job covering the ground I intended to discuss.
However, there is one memorial trend that I don’t see mentioned above. Being a professional driver, I drive A LOT. I see a lot. One trend I’ve noticed here in Texas is the large, green sign erected by TxDOT proclaiming “So-and-so Memorial Highway.” These tend to be for state troopers who (I assume) have died in the line of duty. One I am familiar with is a stretch of IH-35 designated as “Trooper Randy Vetter Memorial Highway.” I did not know Trooper Vetter, but my wife knew him from high school (they weren’t good friends, but they knew each other). Trooper Vetter was murdered while performing a traffic stop on 35 in Kyle, TX. Now, the stretch of freeway through Kyle bears his name. While it is nice that he is remembered in the community he served, it seems sort of creepy to have put his name there. In travelling around Texas, I see memorial signs like this all over. Usually, it is honoring a law enforcement officer, but they also often honor a military person.
If it’s something you have to do to process your grief, I have no problem with it. What I dislike is what I call “recreational grief” where strangers leave mountains of flowers or if it’s a child, teddy bears and whatnot. Sure, it’s sad, but why so wasteful? Surely not everyone leaving all this stuff was personally affected by the loss.
Well now we have to take down the memorial decorations for this thread, it’s alive again.
I’ll point out that a fellow i went to high school with crashed his car while intoxicated and a passenger was killed. The notable part was the bumper that embedded in a tree trunk about 10 feet above the ground. It remains a gruesome memorial today some 20 years on
As a bicyclist, I sometimes come upon a “ghost bike” - these are bicycles painted all white and mounted or locked to something beside a roadway where a bicyclist was killed by a motor vehicle. I sometimes stop to see if there is a message attached about the person whose life was cut short while doing something they probably loved doing. It’s a reminder of the dangers I am in while cycling.
However, a white-painted bicycle mounted along a roadway is likely a distraction for drivers as well, and the last thing I need while riding past one of these is a distracted driver. While I appreciate the pain people go thru losing a loved one on the road, I agree erecting these memorials pretty much amounts to littering.
It gets ratty and dusty pretty quick. Then it just looks sad and forlorned, like they are now forgotten. At which point it doesn’t feel respectful to anyone really.
I would go out and volunteer to help put up these roadside memorials if it would reduce the number of helium-filled balloons being released by family, friends, and community at other memorial events. It is my belief that these balloon releases should be made illegal by Federal law, if they are not already. Maybe under RICO if it can be shown that the participants conspired to release the balloons?
There is a reason why civilization decided long ago that the best material for permanent memorials was carven stone. Most folks still understand that today.
My daughter was killed in a car crash last year. I haven’t been to the site where she died. A memorial on the spot is not something I or the rest of my family would seriously consider. I’ve been doing the job of mourning, grieving, and dealing with it without any material aids, just basically, you know, crying a lot. I also had religious visions of her in glory despite being agnostic about afterlife. I accepted this in stride as I’ve long understood my nervous system is configured to produce religious experiences, and my emotions were overdriven like Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. Well, that’s been the way I’ve found to process grief. Mostly just cry a lot and let it out and don’t try to bottle it up.
My surviving daughter took a stone (gneiss) from the earth turned up on her sister’s grave the day we buried her in rural Maryland, and I explained the geology of it, after checking a geological map of Maryland, how it exemplifies the thrust-belt metamorphism on this side of the Appalachian orogeny. Enlisting my intellect in dealing with grief in support of my emotions. Use whatever you got, I say.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to be reminded by a virtual monument that my loved one died THERE every time I passed that spot but, as someone mentioned, we have to respect how people handle their grief. The concern about creating a distraction is a valid one, so it has to be visible but relatively unobtrusive.
