Um...Trendy?

[summer_jackel]

I've noticed this really odd little custom springing up---that of having decals on your car announcing a death, presumably of a loved one. Instead of, like, a Jesus fish, Calvin praying or little stick figures to represent each member of your family (personally, I have a howling wolf and the silhouette of a clothed woman reading a book on my truck's rear window), you see "John Doe, 1973-2007," sometimes with a little epitaph like 'we miss you.'

OK, so I'm easily as morbid as the next girl. Death and its imagery has always fascinated me and you could probably even get away with accusing me of being a teeny bit goth around the corners. And I certainly understand and respect being in mourning. I can see how having some signal to strangers that you've suffered a recent loss and to be kind to you could be necessary, so maybe this is like automotive mourning garb. But...turning your vehicle into a rolling memorial? Does this help the grief process along? Does it mean that this person died in the car? (Because that's where my sick little mind wants to go). Like, did the driver run over him and this is her attonement?

Isn't it a teeny tiny bit tacky?

Anyway, trends, they amuse. Have any of you seen this around? I've been noticing it a fair amount. This post was inspired by the SUV I was behind today which had not one but two very large memorial stickers on the back window. And I feel kind of bad about snarking on this, because it's not nice to make fun of deaths in someone's family, but I kinda can't help myself. Guys, if I die any time soon, and I know I won't care then because I'll be dead, but memorialize me in some other way than a sticker on your car, ok?

EDITED to add this adorable little Valentine dragonling gifted to me by mooncatx.

Comments

[kjatar.livejournal.com]

I've noticed in primarily from military families and on vehicles with military decals. I think making those stickers may be one of the services the DoD gives to surviving families. *Shrug*

[feuervogel]

I see them primarily in the black community in North Carolina.

[feuervogel]

I see this a lot. There was a sticker on a car in the parking lot at work today that read "In loving memory [name] 1930-2007" or something like that. There are also t-shirts with pictures of loved ones who died.

It strikes me as weird.

[madmanatw.livejournal.com]

I see it on T-shirts a lot.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

A T-shirt might be even worse than a car decal...although I guess it serves the 'mourning garb' purpose. Maybe.

[troubleagain.livejournal.com]

OH, yeah, they're all over, here. I wonder what they do when they trade cars. Do they bother removing it? Do they get a new one for the new car?

Yuck. I hate them, and those little road-side shrines to dead accident victims.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I'm okay with the road side shrine, because presumably it is where the accident was. Putting a sticker on your car or wearing a shirt just strikes me as weird.

On the other hand, when I wore black because I was in mourning people just thought I was goth and/or trying to look nice. On the other, other hand, I didn't much care.

(I have naturally very pale skin and dark hair. Any time I wore a basic black dress - a classic fashion piece for females in our society - people thought I was trying to look goth. I don't think I can change this without dying my hair. Tanning is not an option as my skin has only ever looked tanned if it has first gone through a sun burn, then part of the healing process looks like a nice tan.)

[troubleagain.livejournal.com]

Heh. I couldn't tan if my life depended on it. :D

[nesting.livejournal.com]

I've noticed a lot of them around here. My brother even has one on his truck - in memory of a friend of his who died by playing chicken with his friend in their pickup trucks, but at the last second they swerved into each other instead of into the other lane at 80 mph.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

Oh, ouch! See, this is a situation where I think it's more appropriate to adorn the car. Reminds the driver of the death and to be safe behind the wheel. My little necklace-of-charms-representing-my-beloveds (none of whom, thankfully, are dead) hanging on my rearview mirror serves this function, more or less.

[spacebabie.livejournal.com]

I'd think I'd rather see that than those plastic sets of testicals that hang from the bumpers.

As for me I just got a light green alien head on my radio antennae and a little crystal unicorn hanging from my rear view mirror. I'm gonna add some pegasus decals soon.

[martes.livejournal.com]

I see them here in LA fairly often-- usually among Latinos.

[kynekh-amagire.livejournal.com]

I saw one of those on a vehicle for the very first time ever about a month ago, and had a "WTF?" moment. But upon reflection, I imagine a Creepy Externalizations of Grief scale that looks something like:

10. Naming a child after a dead relative
9. Putting up a webpage in memoriam (creepiness factor increased by a factor of two with each embedded MIDI, especially if it's "Faithfully")
8. Videotaping a funeral
7. Memorial cakes
6. Including someone's ashes in your family photos
5. Vehicle window decals in memoriam
4. Getting an "in memory of" tattoo
3. Getting a lifelike portrait of your dead loved one as a tattoo
2. Reborn-dolls-as-loss-therapy
1. Naming your child after their dead sibling

So it's pretty middle-of-the road, within my experience. Of course, I post this comment with the full knowledge that judging other people by their mourning process is pretty tacky too.

[joreth]

Yeah, those reborn dolls are pretty damn creepy. I've no doubt it makes people *feel* better to hold them, but I don't think it helps them to move on. Lots of things that make us feel good aren't necessarily good for us.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

Reborn dolls: OH YUCK I'm going to have nightmares now. ewwwww...

And the "Lots of things that make us feel good aren't necessarily good for us" idea is what springs to mind when I see the stickers. There's a nice fine line between honoring your grief process by letting yourself have it so that you can eventually heal through it and clinging to it in a way that prevents that healing. It's different for everyone, I suppose...but those dolls are just eww.

[kynekh-amagire.livejournal.com]

Reborn dolls kind of make me want to hide under the bed forever. Especially when this sort of thing keeps happening.

Also, Aimee Mann FTW.

[joreth]

Yep, that's basically how I feel about the car stickers too. That constant, daily reminder is not conducive to letting go. Of course, I don't mean to try and *forget* or remove all trace of a lost loved one, but life does go on.

[dollbunny.livejournal.com]

Oh god my best friend in high school, both her and her brother were named after their dead older brother. They were Christina and Christopher and their parents used to talk about how neither of them were as sweet as the original child. Creep factor to the third power.

[joreth]

Wow, seriously in need of therapy (and probably the kids now too)

[dollbunny.livejournal.com]

Yeah, neither of them has what anyone would call a "good relationship" with their parents.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

Ugh. That's just wrong. My mom was always comparing my brother to me in the negative when he was growing up, and it drove me nuts (worse for him, I'm sure). How much worse if the sibling was dead. People suck.

[troubleagain.livejournal.com]

People do suck. That's sick [and comparing someone to a living sibling or relative also is rather sick and sucky. I remember *one time* (thank God it wasn't more) when my parents asked me why I didn't do X as well as my cousin. They were more careful not to ask my brother why he didn't do X as well as I did.]

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my mom did it to my brother all the time...even in public places like parent meetings at school. And I'm 12 years older than the poor kid, so WTF? I worry that he has deep scarring from that. I try to be kind to him.

[leora.livejournal.com]

While I don't have a problem with naming a child after a dead relative (and while I don't expect to have enough daughters for it to be relevant, one of the names I like and would consider using I am partially drawn to because it is a name that has a family connection. I think it was my great-grandmothers, but I might need another great in there), I like a bit of tradition and history with a name... but after a dead sibling - gah! no, way too close.

My father has his grandfather's name and his father had his grandfather's name in a row of alternating names. He decided to break tradition because he was worried that giving his son his then dead father's name might cause him to have too much psychological baggage with it. If he was worried it might be a possibility, then I think not doing it was definitely the right thing. I don't really see how you can easily give a child a dead sibling's name and not have baggage go with it. If you can, then I'm basically okay with it... but the new kid needs a decent chance at getting their own identity. But then, parents give kids their own name, which kinda bugs me too, for basically the same reasons.

I'm not sure how I feel about the reborn dolls. People seem to be inherently against their existence, but their reason for existing strikes me as very sensible - a child wanted a sibling, the parent didn't want to have another child, and made a very realistic doll for her kid. That seems like a really reasonable attempt at a solution. It's not likely to please the child, it's not a substitute for a sibling, but it does show the parent cares even though they're not willing to give the kid what the kid wants.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

I think that family naming traditions are fascinating for a lot of reasons, and I support that, but yeah, being named for a parent would really suck. Especially since many people seem to need to put a fair bit of emotional distance between themselves and parents as teens and adults.

The reborn dolls just squick me because they're too damn real. I always thought that very realistic dolls looked more like dead babies than toys, and those just add a whole new meaning to macabre.

Wanting a baby is pretty common manifestation of a developmental phase among young children...I forget now exactly what age, I think it's just around three. I remember Timothy going through it as I was studying child development in high school and going "a-hah, there it is!" He would constantly pester mom to have another kid. Which thankfully, she didn't. ;) But he carried around this little baby doll for the duration of the phase; it was his favorite toy and he took very good care of it. (This was a smallish doll; he would have been too small to comfortably carry around a reborn doll). After he hit the next phase, he never touched a doll again.

I guess my point is, yes, dolls are valuable, even necessary toys for children and I'm sure have some value for adults too, but they don't need to be dead-baby-realistic to fulfill the function. eeeeeeeewww.

[joreth]

I hate them. I see them primarily with military and gang-related (either ghetto-gang or redneck-gang) vehicles. I think they're tacky, but the t-shirts with the pictures of the dead person are even worse.

The closest I might want for anyone memorializing me is if anyone wanted to maintain my website for the content that some people seem to find valuable - and that's not a memorial *to me*, per se, but to keep information available since I'm not famous enough to be immortalized in print and stored in libraries :-) (nor am I really good enough to justify it). But all that other stuff is just creepy.

Oh, and I have co-workers (roadies) who have tattoes of dead loved ones, a few even with pictures. Then again, these are the same kinds of people who think there's a big sky daddy who collected their souls and is now taking care of them on a cloud somewhere, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that they think these wierd memorials are a good idea.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

hehhh. yeah, I think that these go along with the big-sky-daddy beliefs to some extent. And the tattoos creep me out even worse...

[joreth]

Yep, I think the first time I ever saw something like that was a tattoo in that psuedo-old English script that's so popular with the latino gangs in CA, and it was some fallen gang-member's name scrawled across the shoulderblades. I was in jr. high at the time. After that, I started noticing them more and more often. That was one of the first signs to me of just how emotionally dangerous the gangs were (we already knew how physically dangerous they were), but it took me several years to reckon out why this was such a problem and how it was connected to the other dangers.

[troubleagain.livejournal.com]

The only memorial I want is to have a tree planted with my remains/ashes, and *if the family insists,* a plaque on or by the tree.

[dollbunny.livejournal.com]

But I already bought part of the sticker :(


I agree it;s very tacky and kind of creepy. Why on your car, next to your "kid is an honor student" stickers? Trying to put the fear of mortality in your achieving student?

[nicole-monkey.livejournal.com]

If you die Robynne and I will make a giant Jackal statue and put it at the edge of a forest overlooking a tide pool! I think that's a little bit better than a sticker on my car that makes everyone feel uncomfortable.
Speaking of those cars, I see them all the time and they take up the majority of people that cut me off, honk, tailgate, take up too much road, and are just generally assholes. Apparently the best way to honor your loved ones memory is to be the biggest jackass on the road.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

awwww, you'll be leaving me in the Northern end of the Sinkyone wilderness, then; one of the few places I know of that has forests overlooking tidepools. Incredibly pristine pools, too. It is unsurprisingly one of my favorite places. Make the statue small, though.

"Apparently the best way to honor your loved ones memory is to be the biggest jackass on the road."--LOL! Yes! SO TRUE.