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Gregory Altreuter  It’s a practice dating back to the Middle Ages, perhaps even ancient Greece: when the body of a relative was buried where it fell, some kind of memorial was left to mark it. Today, the “roadside memorial” is more popular than ever.
In prehistoric times, placing stones on a grave would have been a deterrent to wild animals digging up the body, and this would have grown into the commemorative practice. In England, “Eleanor crosses” were markers set along the roads, the name taken from Eleanor of Aquitaine. “Repentance crosses” were set out at the location where a murder occurred or a victim was found, set up by the person who committed the crime as an act of atonement. Individual memorials have long been commonplace and poignant reminders of lives lost: bends in the road marked with flowers and photographs of young drivers or their passengers tied to a tree, lamp-post or guardrail; bouquets and photographs, a personal message sticky-taped to whatever fixed point is available. And following a child’s abduction, news reports regularly show cellophane-wrapped teddy bears, well-wishing notes and flowers left at the parents’ home or the location the child was last seen.  But it is the mass memorial that has, in recent times, surpassed expectations. I first became aware of the mass “roadside memorial” as phenomenon when Princess Diana died, and the people of England piled tremendous masses of floral bouquets, personal notes, placards and plush toys in front of Buckingham Palace. The outpouring of grief itself might not have been unexpected, but the size and visibility of the display stunned the world. Some thought it grand and fitting, others found it rather tacky.
Chris Hall, the director of the Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement, says we make the mistake of seeing grief as an intra-psychic experience that happens only in the head and heart of an individual. “We’ve really discounted the idea that grief happens in a social context, a community,” he says. “That community of care may be a culture, a faith, or a family, but those communities will have rules about if it’s something we talk about or not and to what extend we make a space for people to acknowledge their loss.” In the wake of September 11, the roadside memorial was used as something else again: an expression of desperate hope as well as an acknowledgement of loss. Suddenly, overnight, every available surface in downtown Manhattan, however far from the site of the disaster or the usual haunts of those lost in the attacks, was covered in missing posters, usually with photos and pleading text about what the person was last wearing and where they might have last been. Just one lost cat or dog poster on a telegraph pole can spin you into a state of mini-grief. As you pass it, day after day, sometimes over weeks or even months, watching it slowly deteriorating, fading in the rain and sun, sometimes torn, you wonder if they were ever found and, if not, what became of them. But in Manhattan after 9/11 it wasn’t just one sign, or a few, but hundreds, everywhere, up and down the streets and avenues, overlaying one another, and the sidewalks beneath these groupings were almost immediately inundated with flowers and votive candles, quickly soiled teddy bears and toys. People stood around these shrines for ages in what seemed like prayerful meditation. Chris says this kind of traumatic event changes people, and changes them in fundamental ways. “I believe we never recover from grief, which is not to suggest that we live with that same intensity of pain. As we change, our relationship to our loss changes as well, so we think about grief in different ways as we move through our lives.” What does the phenomenon of the mass roadside memorial mean? What does it say about us? Here in Australia, following the Bali bombings, we saw similar memorials, like the group of friends heading out on the surfboards to float a wreath. Peter Brock, the popular race car driver, died during a rally, and an informal memorial was almost immediately established at Bathurst, his home course, by hundreds of his fans. “These are experiences that rupture our sense of safety and potentially rupture communities along the weakest fracture points,” says Chris. “So the desire of people to join together, to share a common experience, is quite primal. It’s people wanting to be with others and have their experience validated. There is a sense of intimacy and closeness and people rediscover a sense of community.” Chris points out it’s important we don’t have any rules about grief — that people should or shouldn’t share emotions. “Often these experiences generate an enormous sense of anxiety. We certainly shouldn’t label people who turn up at the gates of Steve Irwin’s zoo as in some way being psychologically weak. "There is something primitive about a sense of community connections. I’m all for people finding their own ways, either privately or publicly, to acknowledge the impact of these experiences on their lives.” There was much talk about the way New Yorkers — notorious for being unfriendly and self-obsessed — pulled together in the months following the attacks. A city so powerful and influential it is sometimes referred to as the “centre of the universe” was quivering with vulnerability, struggling to come to terms with the shocking loss of thousands of lives. Perhaps it is in the face of a shared catastrophe that we experience most poignantly a special bond of mutual grief that reminds us we are interdependent creatures who feel the loss of each other keenly, even those we may never have personally known.
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