Apr 10, 2009 - 04:30 AM
By Neil Crone
Over the last few years I've noticed something that I find a little upsetting. It seems like any drive more than a few kilometres takes me past at least one home-made, roadside memorial to an auto fatality.
You've no doubt witnessed this as well. They are ubiquitous. My own commute takes me past no fewer than five of them. Ten years ago we didn't see these. Certainly not in the number we now do. What is that telling us?
I don't know what to make of this phenomenon. A part of me absolutely understands grief and wanting to remember a lost loved one. It must be life-shattering to get such news and I can fully comprehend not wanting to let someone go. But these roadside wreaths and crosses seem to me more a memorial to catastrophe than any kind of loving tribute.
I don't mean to sound callous. I understand loss. I do. I watched my 24-year-old brother die in a hospital bed, his body riddled with cancer. His death was no less unfair or shocking than if he had been claimed by a drunk driver or icy road. The hole left in our family was just as big as it would've been had he died behind the wheel. And yet, none of us gathered around his bed that day felt compelled to return to that room with a home-made cross and a wreath to mark the place of his passing. That was 25 years ago and I still think of him almost every day. But I do so in my heart and always fondly.
I rarely, if ever, think of him in that bed. Why then, are some of us choosing to remember so vividly the place of the crash? Honestly, I think it's a little unhealthy if not a trifle ghoulish.
I don't doubt that all of these displays are created out of love. Please don't misunderstand me. But I can't help but think that it is misplaced love. It seems to put all the focus on the trauma and not the person who is gone. And if I find them disturbing, I cannot imagine the kind of anguish a family member must have to relive with each drive by. That's just heaping pain upon pain. I certainly can't believe the deceased would wish for their loved ones to have to replay the conditions of their death over and over and over again.
Funerals and headstones and memorials are and always have been for the living. But they have a very specific and appropriate purpose. They are there to help us through the grieving process. To move us towards acceptance of loss and the eventual re-embracing of life once again. They are there to commemorate a life lived, not a life ended.
And that, I think, is what I find so upsetting about these crosses and wreathes and hand-lettered sign-posts of tragedy. They do not move us forward towards life. They seek to keep us at the scene of the accident. They are static, bleak fingers pointing backwards to a very bad moment in time.
The dead would never ask this of us. They have moved on to a much healthier perspective.
Durham resident Neil Crone, actor-comic-writer, saves some of his best lines for his columns.
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