Portland Ghost Bikes

The living’s complicated relationship with makeshift memorials reflect our tangled and complex connections with death. Grief itself is often imprecise, knotted with discursive and, sometimes subliminal, expressions. The makeshift memorial marks a place of tragedy that the living attempt to fill in, signifying, as Candi Cann asserted, that “it is not the dead body but, rather, the grief of the survivors that makes the place important” [1]. At this site, the grief itself becomes inherently political, in an era when “society forbids the living to appear moved by the death of others,” as Phillip Aries discussed in The Denial of Mourning [2]. Kate Sweeney notices this suppression of grief and claims “in a society where this is resolutely true, the roadside memorial becomes sort of a guerrilla move” [3]. The advocacy intentions of a ghost bike memorial could have inadvertently extended to the grieving families, providing them with the safe environment to express the emotions of loss in a world of suppressed grief.

Makeshift memorials as instructional tools encourage increased caution, which demonstrates the focus on the living’s need to rationalize the social and biological death of an individual rather than intimately help the soul of the deceased transition into the afterlife. Compared to early America’s afterlife driven relationship to death, the makeshift memorial allows the material world to take precedent over immaterial salvation.