The Memorial Phenomenon: Caylee Anthony Remembered

Roadside and death site memorials give people an opportunity to express their feelings. People memorialize the death of Caylee Anthony by bringing toys and flowers to the place where she died.

Caylee Anthony is the young child whose remains were recently found in Florida and whose mother, Casey Anthony has been accused of killing her. The toys people brought are being given to needy children, according to a spokesperson of the grandparents, George and Cindy Anthony, who have had to face the cameras many times about this tragedy regarding their daughter, Casey Anthony, and their granddaughter, Caylee Anthony. What is it about events like this that perfect strangers believe they need to express themselves outside of funerals and formal ways? Traditionally we have thought of grave sites and churches as places where people mourn after someone died. These days memorials for the dead are placed in front of the doorways of homes, as with Jacqueline Kennedy when she died. They are placed along fences near 9/11 victims and on bulletin boards. Accident victims are mourned with wreaths, crosses and floral displays along highways and roadsides near towns and cities and in remote rural areas. Folks do so sometimes weep openly, as cameras covering memorials like Caylee Anthony have shown. This practice of placing flowers at places other than traditional ones is common throughout the United States, from Hawaii to the southern parts of the U.S. Often families say they donate the toys and flowers to others, to hospitals or places where people traditionally need help as Caylee Anthony’s grandparents have said they will do. Those watching the events after Princess Diana’s death saw people placing flowers near Buckingham Palace in memory of Diana as a way to express their sorrow. We saw people on the doorstep of Jacqueline Kennedy’s apartment bringing flowers. People were also shown on television at the site where Susan Smith killed her children, and now near the site where Caylee Anthony was found. Television reporters and cameramen cover these events. Those who have written about the aftermath of great tragedies state that people maintain they have a need to join with others to memorialize in that way when they can't do so personally to the victims or their families. ABC’s religion reporters explored this phenomenon. They observed that markers for those who have died in automobile accidents are increasing. Some of these arrangements are simple, some elaborate. The writer states that this “turns public land into private sacred space." The article went on to explain the multiple reasons people respond by putting memorials at the place of death rather than just the graveside. Perhaps, they say, it allows the recognition that death should be recognized in a broad sense. Furthermore it is a spiritual outpouring that is non sectarian, that crosses all religious lines. It allows the construction of a place for people to mourn before the formal event. The article goes on to say it also might be a public rebellion concerning the methods of the state in its control over burial practices. Some of the death sites have permanent monuments to victims of early death, as the case of the victims of Waco where the Branch Davidians were killed in a battle with Federal authorities in the early 1990’s. On a website called Descancos the practice of roadside memorials is explored in a deeply moving way. It is introduced by this beautiful quotation and explains perhaps that people find the memorial at the site of death to be a way of acknowledging something that isn’t ordinarily considered and what is brought to mind especially when a child dies:

Carol Forsloff

Permanent memorial at the site of the Branch Davidians where many children and young adults died during a battle between them and Federal authorities.

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"We say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in an obscure and distant future. It does not occur to us that it can have any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance".

Marcel Proust, In Search Of Lost Time, Vol III -

The Guermantes Way, Part Two : Chapter One