Jennifer Smith: Feeling cross about the rapid spread of roadside memorials

COMMENT


What an eyesore, I think, every time I drive past one.

A car wrecker's yard? A pile of old tyres? A rubbish dump?

No, a roadside cross.

Let me declare right here, I'm not insensitive to road deaths. My own sister died that way; thankfully, before people began marking every road fatality site with an unsightly cross.

Yes, we must get the road toll down. Yes, we must make people more aware of road safety. Yes, we should remember the dead.

But erecting roadside crosses at accident sites should be stopped.

All societies have well-established ways of honouring the dead. Is the roadside an appropriate place for this? When somebody drops dead in a supermarket carpark we don't erect a cross there.

When a rugby player dies during a match, nobody adds a cross to the crossbar.

When somebody dies in hospital ... well, you get my point. A road death is no more worthy of being commemorated than a death in other circumstances.

Nor is the practice consistent. When a pedestrian is killed on a busy city road, a cross doesn't sprout on the nearest shop. When a person dies in a boating tragedy, we don't permanently decorate the river banks with religious symbols.

Roadside memorials can cause emotional stress to affected people. A friend, whose son was involved in a fatal accident many years ago, still makes almost ridiculous detours to avoid driving past that cross, that reminder of a terribly painful time for her and her son.

When families have their loved one cremated rather than buried, it is sometimes because they don't want one particular site to become the focal point for their memories. But, in the case of a road death, society forces them to have a Claytons grave-site in a public place.

Do the families of the deceased get a choice about having a cross erected where their loved one died?

Are farm owners asked if they mind having a cross nailed to their fence? They may not want their property defaced with a cross, or damaged by having it nailed to their fence. But they could never say so ... how churlish a complaint would look.

The crosses are a symbol of Christianity.

Do the well-intentioned people who erect them check that the road victim was a Christian, or the victim's family? I'm sure non-Christians are killed on our roads, too.

How culturally sensitive is it to erect a cross at the place where an atheist, Jew, Muslim or Hindu died?

When does it end? How long do the crosses stay there? Do we take the cross down after X years, thus trivialising the death, making it look as if it's no longer important. Or do we leave it there forever, adding crosses at the rate of 400-600 a year until our highways are fenced with them?

Tourists who get off the plane in Auckland and drive south through an obscene guard of honour of white crosses must wonder what sort of country they're visiting. How safe is this place?

I bet the morbid view doesn't make them drive better, keep to the left or prevent them from dying in a road accident.

And how do these crosses look to New Zealand citizens? To this citizen, they're insensitive, unnecessary, inappropriate visual pollution.

* Jennifer Smith is a Hamilton reader.