Why People Put up Roadside Memorials

A few weeks ago as I was driving I saw a wooden cross along a roadside and it reminded me of the recent death of a friend.  It also made me think of the research I did for my novel Resting Places (why-people-put-up-roadside-memorials). I went cross country with a friend stopping at hundreds of roadside memories (called descansos in the Southwest).  Roadside memorials are those ubiquitous crosses that one sees along our roads and highways, marking the spot where a loved one died violently. In my novel the main character Elizabeth goes on a similar cross-country journey where she stops at many of these memorials trying to understand the death of her child in a car accident.

Why has this tendency of people to put up roadside memorials come now? And why isn’t a cemetery enough of a remembrance to our lost loved ones. First of all, such memorials aren’t new.  They have been practiced for centuries in Europe, as well as in Spanish Mexico and in the Southwest.  They were places where bearers of coffins on the way to a gravesite would put down their “burden” and rest (descanso means “resting place”).  They also marked, as they do today, where people died.  There is a roadside memorial in Ellington, Connecticut, where a young boy died in an accident in 1812.  Second, I think it has something to do with our changing relationship to death and dying. A century ago the loved ones of someone who passed had an active role in conveying their dead to whatever final resting place they felt was appropriate. They did not stand aside and let someone like an indifferent funeral director make all of the decisions and take all of the initiative: for example, the preparation of the body or the transferal to the cemetery, or even the digging of the grave. In Native American rituals, the dead are thought to go on a journey. The Hopi Indians thought the soul moves westwards along a sky path. In preparation for the journey the dead were washed with natural yucca suds and prayer feathers were tied around the head of the deceased. The Lakota typically placed bodies on a scaffold to help the spirit’s journey into the sky. Previous to the 20th Century, rural American families typically had a private gravesite on their farm where they buried their loved ones. People would prepare the body, washing it and dressing it, then “waking” it in their own parlor. The Irish are famous for their women “keening.”  After the wake, the family would transport the body in their own wagon to a grave that they themselves had dug. Robert Frost has a great poem called “Home Burial” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53086/home-burial) about the death and burial of a couple’s child. Such rituals where the loved ones took an active part in conveying the dead from “life to death” enabled the survivors to prepare themselves for their loved one’s death, as well as their own journey toward grief, mourning, remembrance, and recovery. In our modern era, that process is taken out of the hands of those grieving. I think we need to take a more active role, to get our hands dirty, so to speak, in conveying our loved ones to whatever final resting place—be it to our vision of an afterlife, or at least in our hearts. When the loved ones of someone who has died along our roads goes out and digs a hole and erects a cross, often one they themselves constructed, they feel that they have had a hand in guiding their loved one to some spiritual resting place.