Remembering Death at Roadside

Either roadside memorials are becoming increasingly common or I’m starting to notice them more as I age and feel my mortality.  Their bright colors and unusual shapes stick out at the pavement’s edge  where only the usual monotony of signs, guardrails, litter and leafy detritus are expected.

These street-side shrines are highly individual and their makeup reflects the life of the deceased and their loved ones.  Often short lived, they occasionally persist for years under the watchful eye of a friend or relative.  Some include religious icons and symbols while others might be decorated with beer or whiskey bottles, a deck of cards, or packs of cigarettes suggesting a secular and more flamboyant lifestyle.  Balloons, plastic and real flowers, photographs, stuffed animals, mirrors, medallions, coins, statues, whirligigs, pinwheels and gimcracks are typical.  The sites are unpredictable, spontaneous and often grow by accretion as new items are placed beside older ones.

Sometimes the memorial objects possess not only strong symbolism, but a relationship to an actual event.  Such is the case with a white painted bicycle, or “ghost bike,” installed near the site of a fatal crash in Windsor Locks, Connecticut where a cycling teenager was struck and killed by a car operated by an off-duty police officer.

Many roadside shrines appear a little messy, particularly compared to what might be found in a cemetery and especially after they’ve endured the rigors of New England weather for a few months.  I like them that way.  After all, death and grieving are not as neat and sanitized as the traditional funeral home and modern “memorial park” cemetery suggest.  “This is grief that has leapt the fences beyond the little pallid memorial service and the factory-standard marker,” journalist and author Howard Mansfield has written.  “Roadside shrines are rebellions, a protest against mourning without representation.”

Because many of these spots define the very geography of death (often caused by horrific accidents), they exude a certain poignancy not typically found at graveside.  But even those few memorials that don’t mark the location of demise, but a place that has meaning to the deceased and their mourners typically pack an emotional wallop because they are not neatly hidden in a graveyard, but out in the stream of daily life.  In January 2011, a memorial was established at a highway pull-off along State Route 179 in Burlington, Connecticut where a popular chili dog wagon had parked for many years before the sudden death of its owner.  Few local people could pass by without a lump in their throat and the sweet memory of those delicious dogs with the secret family chili recipe.

With most of the sites commemorating car crashes, they become warnings to the motoring public, reminders of tragedy.  On a regular commuter route, they can be out our windshields and in our faces daily.  Reminders of mortality, it would be nice to think that they cause those behind the wheel to slow down and drive defensively.  When I think of them, I recall a popular old epitaph frequently seen in nineteenth century cemeteries:
Remember me as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I,
As I am now, so you will be,
Prepare for death and follow me.

Although far more common today, roadside memorials are not new and astute observers will occasionally notice those from an earlier era.  In Simsbury, Connecticut about ten miles from my home there’s a brownstone slab at the edge of East Weatogue Street commemorating “the fatal wound that Mr. David Russell rec’d at this place by a cartwheel running across his body on the 15th day of June 1782 in the 38th year of his age.”  Beautifully carved with scalloping and the image of a wheel, the lichen encrusted marker looks like a tombstone.  But Russell’s body is in fact marked by another stone, complete with death angel, that lies above his remains in a nearby cemetery.

Whether old or new, garish or subdued, I’m glad to see these memorials despite the disaster they represent.  Inasmuch as they are generally ephemeral, they help sharpen my sense of the fleeting and fragile present.  Furthermore, they imbue the landscape with humanity and resonate with meanings stretching far beyond my daily thoughts and desires.