Everyday on my way to work I pass a highway memorial just past the intersection of the NJ Turnpike and the Garden State. I’ve seen visitors tend to its plaque and synthetic flowers, and I’ve witnessed highway maintenance crews carefully keep the place clear of debris. Memorials become a place where the community can see and witness a family’s pain, and they become a place where the community of friends and family gather.
A mother recently told me about the memorial she built on Route 22, where her son crashed his car like so many other teens on that roadway. She shared how the police have closed the roadway to keep her safe, while providing her the opportunity to stand in that sacred place where her son died. It is a place where she goes to imagine the events and decisions that led to her early morning nightmare.
I’ve been asked on numerous occasions about roadside memorials and why families would visit a strip of tar when they could simply go to a grave or hold an urn. I’ve seen roadside memorials that are frequently visited for years, while others are left unattended following funeral arrangements. I think the reasons why someone would want a roadside memorial are personal and they meet a particular need of the bereaved.
Memorials address the fluid emotions during grief and become a place where the reality of a person’s death can be felt or experienced, perhaps as a result of seeing the skid marks or shattered glass or by reading the notes of other visitors.
I believe memorials at the place of death also engage the sacred or holy. I don’t use those words to have a religious connotation, but to capture the importance that “place” can play in one’s grief. At that place, where those skid marks end and the glass and rubber are strewn, something very big and important happened. There, almost with an “X” to mark the spot, is where the person we loved or knew left us. That is where the person’s life ended and where our grief began.
A lot of people gather at a crash site following a death and then re-gather at the funeral home, church, cemetery or a family home in the following days. However, in those early hours after an accident the place of death provides comfort or a narrative that helps with the digestion of the painful reality. Often times, the place of interment trumps the accident scene because a new place is made sacred to the family and friends, as they now have a new place of visitation or “ final rest.”
Often, a home where a person died in hospice care or suffered a heart attack or slipped down stairs becomes sacred to a family, making a home very hard to sell or even redecorate. The underlying theme is the sacredness and comfort some find in that space where life and death met. There are many religious, cultural, and familial traditions around death and the place of death. So people engage grief, rituals, and sacred space in very different ways.
The hospice where I once worked kept a rose on the bed where a person died for a full day to mark the significance of that place. While some people find comfort in acknowledging and delineating space, others much rather ignore it or do not see its significance.
Our interaction with space and the place where someone died is very much related to how we grieve and what we find helpful or necessary. The important thing for us to remember is that highway memorials and other expressions are important to the grieving and healing of many people. We can support these individuals by giving them the space to express themselves.