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Abstract
The design and selection of a memorial stone and the site of the grave, both of which represent the deceased, can be a central issue for people bereaved by traffic accidents. This was revealed in an interview survey of recent Swedish roadside memorials and other memorial places. In this article we consider the design and selection of the memorial stone and gravesite as expressions of continuing care for the deceased and as a way to offer comfort to the bereaved. Materiality, representation and presence will be discussed as crucial parts of the link between the living and the dead. Communicative, spatial and physical values are important also in the professional's design of common public memorial places. Of specific interest for this text are two design practice-based terms, memory object and passage landscape, which may be used by landscape architects when designing memorial places, such as cemeteries and public monuments. Throughout this text, we argue that memorial places like these are capable of bridging the gap between the space of life and the space of death, as well as supporting the regeneration of present memories and the construction of future ones.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Jan-Olof Aggedal for serving as an opponent of this text at a seminar held at the Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Lund University, on 18 March 2010. We also want to thank the other members of the research group ‘Designing Places for Memory and Meaning in the Contemporary Urban Landscape’: Ann-Britt Sörensen, Mats Lieberg and Sabina Jallow, as well as Petersson's supervisors Lars-Henrik Ståhl and Gunnar Sandin, as well as the reviewers and editors of Mortality.
Notes
[1] One reason for this may be the new and more liberal Swedish burial law of 1990, which gives the owner of the grave greater freedom than before to determine the appearance of the memorial stone and gravesite (SFS, Citation1990:1144, §§ 25-9).
[2] The phenomenon of recent roadside memorialisation in Sweden seems to have developed over the last 20–25 years even though earlier occasional cases as well as similar precedent practices can be found (Petersson, Citation2009a).
[3] The search for interviewees was conducted with the help of an informative letter which explained the survey as well as asked for volunteers. The letter was sent to the trade union papers Åkeri & Transport and Svenska Transportarbetareförbundets medlemstidning, which published the content of the letter at the end of April in 2005, and to the workplaces Taxi Kurir in Malmö, Taxi Skåne in Lund, Sanofi-Aventis in Lund, the Swedish Road Administration in Malmö, Kristianstad and Gothenburg, and to the organisation MADD Sweden. In the group with people bereaved by traffic accidents four persons out of six where found through MADD Sweden and two persons were contacted through friends and relatives.
[4] All quotations in this text are Petersson's own translations of the respondents' original Swedish.
[5] For different types of bereavement see Francis et al., Citation2005, pp. 141–178; Klass et al., Citation1996.
[6] For a discussion of the cultural construction of different forms of dying as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ see Seale and Van der Geest, Citation2004; for models of the ‘good’ death and ‘good’ grief see Walter, Citation1994, pp. 109–120; and for the construction of ‘good’ death see Valentine, Citation2008, pp. 40–72.
[7] The ritual activities revealed in the interview material have been discussed in other texts (Petersson, Citation2009a, Citation2009b, Citation2010) and will not be further explored in this article.
[8] For other decisions affecting the bereaved's selection of a site of the grave, see Sörensen, Citation2009.
[9] Memorial practices like these also reflect a relatively new approach to mourning in modern Western society, which reveals a way of living with grief by creating new relations and ‘continuing bonds’ to the deceased instead of trying to seek an end to mourning by letting go of the past (Hallam et al., Citation1999; Klass et al., Citation1996; Prendergast et al., Citation2006; Valentine, Citation2008).
[10] The research project ‘Designing Places for Memory and Meaning in the Contemporary Urban Landscape’ is an interdisciplinary three-year research project, funded by the Swedish research council Formas, of which both Petersson and Wingren are members.
[11] However, it is important to point out that in this particular example the bereaved do not see the memorial stone as the deceased boy; they see it as a sculpture with similar features. Personal communication at the workshop held as part of the research project ‘Designing Places for Memory and Meaning in the Contemporary Urban Landscape’ on 5 November 2009, at the University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp, Sweden.
[12] Works that might be useful in a more general discussion of private and public space and practice include De Certeau's (Citation1984/2002) division between ‘space’ and ‘place’ and Lefèbvre's (Citation1974/1991) three-part concept of ‘representational space’, ‘spatial practice’ and ‘representations of space’.
[13] One example of a rite of passage is the burial ceremony, which allows for the dead body to go through a purifying preliminal phase, an ambiguous liminal phase, and a reintegrating postliminal phase in which the corpse is let back into society when interred in the burial place at the cemetery (Turner, Citation1967/1970, pp. 93–110; van Gennep, Citation1909/1960, pp. 146–165).
[14] The questionnaires were distributed through an upper secondary school, in which many of the deceased had been students, and through BOA.
[15] The quotations in this section are Petersson's own translation of the respondents' original Swedish.
[16] Initially, the arson committed was seen as a racist crime by the media as well as among people in the society where the fire took place. However, it later came to the fore that this was not the case (see Nieminen Kristofersson, Citation2002, pp. 9–11).
[17] The restored memorial hall is now mainly used by the relatives association BOA which has moved its office to the location. The memorial hall is also used for fire safety education for schools and rescue services.
[18] In Lieberg's and Sörensen's study some bereaved hold the memorial place at Backaplan as more meaningful to them than the grave in the cemetery. In Petersson's study four out of six of the informants bereaved by road traffic accidents rated the grave as the main memorial place while the home memorial, or simply the home in general, was second; two out of six rated the home as the main memorial place and the grave second; the accident site was considered the least important by all of the bereaved (Petersson, Citation2009a, p. 82; 2009b, pp. 134–135). When estimating the intensity, importance and meaning of the various memorials places it is, however, important to note that memorial activity changes over time (Everett, Citation2000, pp. 101–102; Petersson, Citation2010).