Expert calls for ritual if memorials must go
REMOVAL of a roadside memorial should involve a special ritual for both mourners and the person whose property is affected, says a Griffith University expert on grief and death. Dr Margaret Gibson says the controversy over a Tallai roadside shrine demonstrates a new tension in modern life in which the old boundaries between spaces for the dead and the living – cemeteries and the outside, everyday world – have broken down. Dr Gibson, whose specialty as a senior lecturer in Griffith’s School of Humanities is death, grief and culture, said yesterday it was unfortunate a Tallai property owner removed the shrine so quickly. Such memorials were symbols of loss for grieving families and friends and a stark reminder of the inevitability of death. “These are tensions of modern life where signs of grief and death do not fit neatly into their assigned spaces such as cemeteries or memorial parks,’’ she said. “The idea that someone else’s grief from a death is close to the home of a stranger is also complicated. I think in these matters some kind of ritual has to take place for the memorial itself. “It has to be removed in a way that involves the grieving and perhaps even oddly the willingness of the property owner so that they understand that it is not a simple thing and that place right at their home does hold this terrible sadness for a stranger.’’
The Tallai man removed the shrine after objecting this week to people placing flowers around a tree at the front of his property where a woman died and a man was critically injured in a crash on The Panorama on July 9.
Dr Gibson previously told the Bulletin – in an interview about roadside shrines in 2014 – that makeshift memorials set up by grieving families and friends, and other practices such as going online to express grief directly to the departed, are part of coping with loss.
“We still believe in ghosts, we still have ghosts in that sense. Our dead loved ones never really go away,’’ Dr Gibson said at the time.
“Even in what you might call a post-religious society, people talk directly to deceased friends (on Facebook, at a grave or at a roadside shrine).
“In some sense we’re shoring up our sense of coping. We direct it to the deceased, but we’re really assisting ourselves to cope with loss.’’
Dr Gibson’s published academic work includes a book called Death and Grief in the Landscape: Private Memorials in Public Space.
She told the Bulletin in 2014 that roadside memorials would not go away because they were part of people’s response to death “in transit’’, which was all too frequent in a highly mobile, high-speed society.