c. 2005 Religion News Service

CLEVELAND _ The roadside memorial is starting to look as worn and weary as grief itself, the kind that won’t leave no matter how much you want it to go away.

For the past eight months or so, I’ve passed the homemade shrine on a busy patch of road in a Cleveland neighborhood that most suburbanites rush through on their way to somewhere else. Even in a hurry, though, it’s hard to miss this tribute.

The giant stuffed gorilla always gets to me. He’s tied to the telephone pole, leaning like he’s just too sad to get up. I’ve passed by that puzzled face so many times that “it” has become the “he” who feels like a tired old friend, his once brown coat now a miserable shade of gray.

There are two crosses, one wood, the other Styrofoam. Someone tied a brown baby doll to the pole, too, along with several bunches of artificial flowers, including a bouquet of faded pink silk roses held tight with duct tape.

The doll and gorilla suggested this was a tribute to a child, but I wasn’t sure. All I really knew was that someone died and now someone else grieved.

Roadside memorials have become increasingly controversial, particularly those erected on busy highways. Some argue that they’re hazardous because they distract drivers or endanger the pedestrians tending them. Others object to religious symbols posted on government property.

Many, I suspect, can identify with the reader who wrote to me complaining that all these anonymous memorials are reminders of something he’d rather not think about.

“I don’t want to come across as insensitive or heartless,” he said. “I think losing a loved one, especially in an accident, is tragic. What concerns me is the volume of markers along roadways. When did it become `fashionable’ to identify these life-taking locations? I wonder when it will end. … Why would anyone, especially the families, want a constant reminder of such tragedy?”

These days it is so easy to distance ourselves from one another. We have voice-mail and e-mail and caller ID, but no amount of technology can insulate us from the universal promise that, one day, it will all come to an earthly end for every last one of us.

Roadside memorials are as raw and imperfect as the humans who erect them. We cannot look away, and that is both their curse and their blessing. If we must think of the person who died on the same route we are traveling, then we must also face that someday we’ll run out of road, too. That can change a mood real fast.

Last week, I parked my car in front of the memorial. There were items I hadn’t noticed before: a baseball cap embroidered with “Kiss Me”; red boxing gloves stitched to the gorilla’s hands; a man’s black sneaker, tucked in the grass.

I walked the neighborhood to see if anyone could tell me about the person who died.

“Someone in the church might know,” a man out walking said, pointing to the Baptist church.

“It was a man in his late 50s,” the church secretary said. “That’s all I know.”

Two other men strolling told me he’d been out walking when he was hit by a car.

“Car took off,” one of them said.

A group of customers in a nearby gasoline station offered more bits and pieces. “Jesse!” said one woman, smiling at her sudden rush of memory. “That’s right! His name was Jesse!”

When I returned to the site, a man sitting under a tree approached me. “I was still in the penitentiary when he got hit by a car,” he said. “It was at least six months ago. On Halloween.”

Our newspaper ran three short paragraphs about the accident on Nov. 1, 2004. A pedestrian was hit and killed around 7 p.m. by an SUV that fled the scene.

“The identity of the victim, a 56-year-old man, was not immediately available,” the story read.

I had an age and a date. Cleveland police gave me his name.

Every day I pass a roadside memorial for a man named Jesse Elston.

And every day someone who loved Jesse Elston still grieves.

MO/JL END SCHULTZ

(Connie Schultz is a columnist for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.)