Cross Purposes

With descansos, says Peter van Lent, there's also a need to share that passing with others. Van Lent is coordinator of Native American studies at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. He became fascinated with descansos during a sabbatical in Santa Fe and wrote a paper on them with his daughter, who is a psychologist. "There is the desire to reach out to others and invite them in," van Lent says. "A roadside is a very public place. A cemetery is a very private place. This is a gesture to a community or a society to share in the grief of an individual."

But more than that, says James Griffith, former head of the Southwestern Folklore Center at the University of Arizona, there is the need, particularly among Hispanic Catholics, to prepare the victim for the afterlife. "Here you have a soul that went to a sudden death without spiritual preparation by the church," he explains. "This is a reminder to pray for this person, that those prayers will help them through purgatory."

Ironically, Sapp says, the absence of religion in many people's lives and the disappearance of rituals has contributed to the current popularity of descansos. There are so few tangible ways for people to grieve. "We no longer really do that in America," he adds. "We say, 'Oh, gee, really? I'm sorry your father died, but you will be in at work tomorrow?' That's the attitude. In terms of honest-to-goodness funerals, the numbers are plummeting. Many more people are going for direct cremation. The body goes from the funeral home to the crematorium, and that's it. A lot of people are saying that's very unhealthy because grief is real. Grief is there. If it isn't dealt with in a direct way, it will manifest itself. Unresolved grief will force itself out. By denying death and the practices and rituals that we've engaged in throughout human history, we're not allowing ourselves to grieve. These roadside memorials are expressions of the need for that."

Collins agrees. "We have isolated death and its aftermath so effectively, there is no immediacy anymore," he says. "A century ago, when there was a death in the family, even an accident, it was the family that prepared the body and built the coffin and dug the grave. There was a lot of contact. Today, institutions step in. Whether it's the EMTs, the hospital or the mortuary, there's a separation between the family and the deceased. In short, we used to bury our own. Now institution takes over. With descansos, there seems to be a need to let the deceased know that we are sorry we weren't there and to do something about it."

Rather than surrendering death to an industry, the roadside memorials bring an intimacy to death. "The whole thing has become so commercial," van Lent says. "You go to a place and pick out a headstone and a casket, and the funeral takes over. This is an effort to assert the personal. The purpose of putting up a descanso is putting it up yourself, doing it yourself, using very personal things. If it was cowboy who was killed, you make it of horseshoes. You put things that were very dear to the person. It might be a reaction to the commercialization, and therefore the de-personalization, of grieving.

"It is purposely deliberate and not manufactured," he adds. "It has resisted the effort to be commercialized. It's turning grief into an artistic creation. Folk art is still alive."

Some survivors have no choice but to raise roadside memorials, according to Charles Zdravesky, a disc jockey who compiled a descansos documentary for KUNM radio in Albuquerque. "There's the girlfriend of one guy who was killed and his body was cremated, and the only place she has to grieve is the descanso on the side of the highway," he says. "For her, that was it."

McRee understands. "I was raised a Baptist, and a lot of it, we just didn't express grief in public," she says. "It was like, 'How dare you shed tears in public?' It was considered bad manners. When I saw these descansos, I thought, 'How wonderful to put grief out there. How wonderful to put grief out there for the world and not be afraid.' To me, they symbolize love."

It was foggy that morning, so when the truck driver pulled a K-turn on the county road, he didn't see Don's motorcycle. And when the driver backed up, he backed into Don.

When her daughter died a decade later, Jolene Korgan felt the same way she had when she learned about her husband's death in August 1987. She had the same urge to learn everything, to put together all the puzzle pieces, to walk the ground where it had happened, to sit beside the guardrail, unfold a pocket knife and scratch a loved one's name. "Don Lives."