7 p.m Wednesday, March 30, 2005: 17-year-old DeMario Moore, walking home in the
northwest section of the city after playing basketball, stops to talk to a girl
he knows from school. They don’t talk long, but when Moore walks away, he is shot in the back by the
girl’s boyfriend. Moore is dead before the ambulance arrives.
“He didn’t run,” recalls his mother Sharon Moore. “My boy
didn’t even know what happened to him.”
By late that evening,
classmates, neighbors, friends, even total strangers are placing small
mementoes along the wooden fence at the corner of Wilson near North. Candles, pictures, poems,
stuffed animals, T-shirts, a football, incense, and flowers stretch the length
of the fence. Several crosses, some merely two boards nailed together, are
planted in the ground. The nearly 30-foot-long memorial, with the mementos delicately
pieced together, reaches several feet high.
A disgusted Sharon Moore talks about the young man who
killed her son — an acquaintance who had been at DeMario’s birthday party
just 15 days earlier. “One of these little street rats we got hanging’ around
here with no future,” says Moore.
“Nowhere to go.”
“He had no future so he takes my son’s,” she says, shaking
her head. “People loved DeMario,” says Moore.
“He was a pretty boy. He loved football. The boy loved anything to do with
sports, but he really loved football. He was an honor student, and he said he
wanted to go to school to learn how to design his own clothing line. He always
had lots of ideas.
“But I thought he should do something in health care,” says Moore,
“or something working with people. He loved working with older people, and they
all loved him.”
Moore says she
is comforted by the neighborhood memorial, grateful that so many people cared
enough to leave something in his memory.
“I feel like he is closer to us when I see it,” she says. “I
feel like he could come walkin’ around the corner at any moment. He would like
it, too. It shows you just how popular he was. He touched so many people in
such a short time.”
They appear along
roadsides in the country, at busy city intersections, on interstate
highways, and deep inside residential neighborhoods. They stand among the
weeds, guard rails, and rubber sheathing of blown tires. At first glance, they
seem awkward and out of place, like Christmas ornaments in the middle of
summer. Ruby red silk flowers fade to rose. Patriotic ribbons fray in the wind.
Crosses lean into hillsides. These makeshift memorials mark the intersection
between two worlds, before and after, heaven and earth. In almost every case,
they speak about life and loss in a way that is both macabre and beautiful.
Roadside memorials are found all over the world. They’re in Ukraine
and Utah. They’re common in South
and Latin America, countries where Catholicism has mixed
with the beliefs of indigenous people. In Mexico,
they’re called descansos:rest. And while they are not as common
in the northeast as they are in the southwestern US, more seem to appear here
every year. Those found on highways are almost entirely the result of vehicular
accidents, many involving alcohol. Memorials found in neighborhoods tend to be
the result of street violence involving handguns.
One thing they all seem to have in common: They appear to be
a reference to young people taken unexpectedly and prematurely, the loss of
innocence.
10 p.m., Monday, July 13, 2003: 22-year-old Michael Coyle calls his father
to say he is on his way to pick up his girlfriend, Jessica Lynn Piurkoski. As
they head west across the IrondequoitBayBridge, another car, eastbound in the wrong lane, crashes into them. The
head-on collision claims all three lives.
Michael Coyle was “a romantic,” says his father, also named
Michael. “A good-looking kid. A loving kid. He would have been 25 this
November.”
“He was a free spirit,” says Coyle, “and he had girls. Oh,
gosh, he had girls around him for years. But he wasn’t serious until he met
Jess. He told me once, ‘Dad, I think she’s the one. I think I’m in love.’ We
laughed about it a little, but I think he really did care for her, and
sometimes I wonder what would have happened if they had lived. Where would they
be today?”
Until a few years ago, the senior Coyle lived in Hamlin with
his wife and their three children. He describes a 10-year period of bad luck
that left him divorced. And just when things seemed like they couldn’t get any
worse, he lost his son.
“I knew what that experience was like, because my brother
died of cancer,” he says, “and that was hard, especially on my father. I
remember him saying to me that it was so unfair. It just seemed wrong to him to
be burying his child. And here I ended up going through the same thing. And he
was right; it was the most horrible experience I’ve ever known.”
Coyle says he can’t be angry at the driver of the other car,
even though there were reports that alcohol may have contributed to the crash.
“What good does it do?” he asks. “For a while, I was angry, but now I just
think it was too bad for all of them. There’s no way to explain it. For a long
time, I kept asking myself: Why my son? But there’s just no answer to things like that.”
Almost immediately, Jessica and Michael’s friends began
putting a memorial together on the bridge. As word got around, more items were
added. Although two years have passed, it’s not unusual to see the site
freshened up with new flowers and stuffed animals. Coyle checks the site
regularly and is sometimes its caretaker.
“His mother called me up a little while ago. She won’t go by
it. But she calls me up and said that so and so told her one of the crosses was
coming down. Would I go fix it up? And of course, I did. I stop by every now
and then. Even though I know he’s not buried there, I feel closer to him there.
I’m drawn to it. I have some kind of connection to it.”
“Sometimes I just want people to know how great a kid he
was,” says Coyle. The accident “made headlines for a few days,” he says, “and
then it was over. And I just want people to remember. He’s still a part of me.
He’ll always be a part of our lives.”
And Coyle says he is grateful for one thing: He learned how
to express his feelings for his son. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “We had our
share of problems. But even though he went from being a boy to a grown man, we
still hugged, and I told him I loved him. He was like that, too. He would still
hug me. Even if you have problems with your kids, man, never forget to tell
them you love them. I thank God for that every day.”
A car pulled up and
stopped in front of Mary McCluz’s house on East
Main Street on a clear Sunday morning in April two
years ago. Several women, dressed as if they were just returning from church,
got out and began to clear away the base of a tree next to the curb. One of the
women worked on her hands and knees; the others stuffed debris into plastic
trash bags. An hour later, a bed of artificial flowers circled the base. Huge
white and yellow stuffed animals were tied to the trunk. And as the women stood
around the tree; one kissed her hand, then pressed it against the bark.
McCluz doesn’t know the women. And she doesn’t know about an
accident at that site. But she doesn’t mind the attention the memorial gets.
The women visit the tree from time to time. And between visits, if the memorial
looks a little shabby, McCluz herself goes out and spruces up the site for
them.
“I know whatever it was, it made them terribly sad,” she
says. “They’re not from around here, so I thought it might make them feel a
little better if they knew someone else was helping them take care of it. It’s
the least I can do. If somebody is that tore up inside, you know they need a
little help.”
Reactions to roadside
memorials vary. Some people see them as art. Ansel Adams’ riveting
“Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico”
(1941) is, according to some experts, the most sought-after fine-art photograph
ever taken. A roadside cemetery next to an adobe hut, the moon suspended above
a drift of clouds: The work suggests an image of heaven and earth. And it
captures the essence of roadside memorials with uncanny perception.
Other people find memorials disturbing or unsightly. The original
memorial to DeMario Moore was abruptly collected and carted away by city
workers. When friends and neighbors complained, however, the destruction caught
the attention of Mayor Bill Johnson.
“He came down here himself and apologized,” says Sharon Moore.
“He said it was a mistake and it wouldn’t happen again. We were free to put the
memorial back if we wanted to.” Areplacement now stands on Wilson
Street.
In contemporary American society, outwardly mourning the
loss of a loved one has become less visible. “We have a great deal of exposure
to death through the media,” says Christine Bochen, professor of religious
studies at NazarethCollege,
“but as a people, it is unfamiliar to us. And I see these memorials as an
expression of that grief.”
“As a society, we have seen a decline in the symbols of
mourning,” says Bochen. “Years ago, one would wear black clothing to mark the
event and to tell others that one is in mourning, and I think the memorials
take on two roles: One is to memorialize the loved one and to ask others to
remember this person we loved, and the other is to communicate a message, to
tell a story.”
Bochen has been teaching a class on death and dying for more
than 10 years.
“Acts like these are spontaneous and unconventional,” she
says. “The sites can seem primitive. And I have noticed over the years of
teaching this class that we are often talking about the resilience of the human
spirit.”
“Death is really about living,” says Bochen. And she notes
how Americans’ perspective about death has changed over the last 20 years. “The
right to die through assisted suicide, the resistance to the death penalty, the
whole integration of hospice being seen as a part of end-of-life treatment:
These things are relatively new,” she says. “And I think the roadside memorials
are a reflection of that trend.”
2:30 a.m., Thursday, July 29, 2005: Benjamin Howe, age 22, loses control of his
car on the Lake
Ontario Parkway. He may have dodged a deer. Maybe he just dozed off at the wheel.
“Short in stature, but big in presence. The loud one in the
group: That was Ben,” says his mother, Sharyn Howe. “He loved wrestling, and it
was kind of funny to see little Ben horsing around with these big guys. Come
Monday night, you always knew where Ben was. That was wrestling night.”
“He was sensitive, too,” says his sister Maegan. “Nothing
bothered him more than racism. He hated it, and he wasn’t afraid to let you
know it, either. He wasn’t afraid of anything — except spiders.” Maegan
laughs, remembering her brother.
All she has ever wanted from life, says Sharyn Howe, was to
know that her kids were happy, healthy, good people. And she never thought
about Ben dying. “It never once entered my mind,” she says. “Ben was so full of
life.”
Howe and her daughter smile, talking about Ben. “He would
probably love all this attention,” says Howe. “He would go into a department
store and pretend he was lost just so they would call out over the loud
speaker.” Sometimes Ben himself would speak into the microphone. “And of
course, he wasn’t lost,” says Howe. “He just loved hearing his own voice. Oh, I
would be so embarrassed. He was a handful, but he was never dull.”
Sharon Howe’s sister, Patty Haines began putting together
the roadside memorial for her nephew. She had seen other memorials, and this
seemed a way both to honor Ben and to help the family through a difficult time.
Ben’s memorial consists of two crosses, one poised on each
side of the Parkway. “There was some confusion as to where the accident
actually occurred,” says Haines, “because there aretire marks where you
can see how the car went across the highway to the other side. That’s why there
is more than one cross. We really don’t know all the details of what happened.
They say it was excessive speed. But it was his father’s ’62 Subaru, and you
really couldn’t drive too fast in that car because it would start to shake.”
Haines doesn’t find memorials depressing. “And it is not a
religious statement,” she says. “I think they’re beautiful. We just want people
to know that we lost someone precious here. And if people read a message into
it and think maybe they should drive a little more cautiously, that’s fine. It
could help someone else’s family.”
This article appears in Sep 21-27, 2005.
