EDMONTON - The first flowers appeared within hours. On Oct. 22, even as Ottawa and the nation swirled with uncertainty and fear, people began approaching the lines of police tape that had been strung around the National War Memorial, laying bouquets for Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, who had been shot and killed there that morning. There was one bouquet, then two. Then dozens. By the time the memorial reopened to the public two days later, soldiers spent nearly an hour making their way to it, gently moving aside flowers and mementoes so they could pass through to their posts. Still the memorial continued to grow, and so did the range of items left there. There were notes and letters, candles and teddy bears, hockey sticks and jerseys, Canadian flags. There was a sculpture of a soldier with a child and two dogs. There were coins and unopened cans of beer. When the area needed to be cleared for Remembrance Day ceremonies, a decision had to be made about what to do with all of the items that had been left there. It seemed to be the right thing to collect it all, and start going through it.

Teddy bears, candles and flowers at one of several memorials at the scene of April’s multiple fatal stabbings in northwest Calgary. Memorial sites have been a part of human culture since ancient times. Shelley Hornstein, a professor of architectural history and urban culture at York University, points to the Old Testament story of Rachel dying on the way to Bethlehem, and her husband, Jacob, marking the spot with stones or a pillar. The site would become Rachel’s Tomb, a holy place for Christians, Muslims and Jews. “Why would he have felt an obligation to mark the site?” Hornstein asked. “The obvious response is so we wouldn’t walk over it, and also so those passing by would understand that something happened here. Without that object — something physical, visible, tangible that marks the site — it disappears.” The urge to mark a place of death or tragedy is repeated throughout cultures. In New Mexico, roadside memorials are protected as cultural sites. Some of the descansos ­— or “resting places” — go back hundreds of years. Elsewhere in North America, roadside memorials can be controversial, even illegal. Opponents object to roadside shrines as distracting, inappropriate or morbid, but they continue to be so prevalent that roadside crosses can now be purchased online, and there are multiple books and blogs documenting roadside shrines around North America. In many cities, including Edmonton, bicycle fatalities are often marked with a white “ghost bike” intended, in part, to raise awareness about traffic dangers cyclists face.

A memorial to a car accident victim at Highway 16A and Township Road 530 on Aug. 18, 2014. Roadside memorials are a big enough issue that provinces such as Alberta now have regulations around their placement, construction and how long they can remain in place. Alberta Transportation spokeswoman Jasmine Franklin said government officials try to work with the public on the memorials, and treat the sites with “the utmost respect.” “There’s still that balance between remembering the loved ones and keeping the travelling public safe,” she said. “We understand that this really is a big part of the grieving process and we try to respect that.” The phenomenon of spontaneous, large-scale public memorials took off in the early 1980s, with the opening of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Soon after the memorial opened, people started bringing items to the site. In addition to the traditional flowers, the memorial offerings included photographs, food, art, jewelry and even a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Every time the artifacts were removed, more would appear. National Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst said items are collected from the memorial at the beginning and end of every shift, and are then documented and stored by a team of curators. There have been more than 400,000 items left at the site since it opened, and people are still leaving things there more than three decades later. Similar large-scale memorials arose at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing, where 168 people died in 1995, and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997 sparked a memorial of massive proportions. The practice soon caught the attention of academics and social scientists as a developing cultural phenomenon. Writing about the topic in 1997, Texas professor C. Allen Haney and his colleagues described spontaneous memorial sites as “an emerging American mourning ritual,” a new kind of public response to sudden, violent death. Haney said most people who were contributing items to the memorials were trying to “comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible,” seeking closure by facing the physical reality of the death. “It is as if a site that previously had no special meaning takes on a sacred quality once human blood has been spilled there,” he and his colleagues wrote, in a paper called Spontaneous Memorialization: Violent Death and Emerging Mourning Ritual, which was published in Omega: Journal of Death and Dying. Haney noticed spontaneous memorials usually arose for people who were killed while going about everyday life, in a situation where one would normally expect to be safe. In most cases, the memorials were at the place of death, and emerged very quickly after the incident in what seemed to Haney an “almost urgent” response. This year in Alberta, spontaneous memorials appeared at the house where five Calgary university students were stabbed to death at a party in April, and at the Calgary home of Alvin and Kathy Liknes, the last place they and their grandson, Nathan O’Brien, were seen alive in June.

Flowers and teddy bears are shown at an impromptu memorial for Nathan O’Brien and his grandparents, Alvin and Kathryn Liknes, at the Liknes home in Calgary, July 15, 2014. In Edmonton, a large memorial of notes, teddy bears and flowers appeared at the spot where a toddler was killed by a vehicle while sitting with his parents at a south Edmonton restaurant in 2013. Smaller memorials arise often at homicide scenes and other fatalities, flowers and candles marking the spot for a few days or weeks before quietly disappearing. “Such an event carries a message that death can occur arbitrarily and unfairly, themes which are notably absent from the prevailing myth of controlled death, and suggests severe limits to our cultural promise of safety and control,” Haney and his colleagues wrote. Sylvia Grider was a folklorist and anthropology professor at Texas A & M University in 1999, when a massive stack of 5,000 logs being prepared for the university’s annual bonfire collapsed during construction, killing 12 students and injuring 27 others. That the tragedy came just months after the school shootings in Columbine, Colorado, seemed to compound the tragedy.

Within hours, Grider noticed that the orange police fence around the scene was already being covered with items, and soon people were travelling from around the state to visit the scene. Grider knew it was a spontaneous memorial. She also knew it had to be dealt with very carefully. “It was a potential public relations disaster, because what do you do with the shrine?” said Grider, now retired. “There was no protocol for that kind of thing.” In fact, dealing with the memorial would take the next 15 years, dominating the rest of her working life and making her an expert in the subject as she sought to understand actions of mourners who, for the most part, didn’t understand the behaviour themselves. “It doesn’t do any good to ask, ‘Why did you leave your T-shirt there? Why did you take your necklace and leave it there?’ ” she said. “It isn’t any good to ask that, because they don’t know. People can’t answer that question.” Grider said she believes the memorials are an extension of a materialistic culture, in which people are deeply connected to material items. But the very heart of the motivation is something simpler. “People do this because they are heartbroken and it makes them feel better,” she said. The burden of material items after a tragedy can be significant. It may be therapeutic for people to give a memento at a memorial site, but once given, the item takes on a life of its own. Hornstein said objects left at a memorial site are so infused with emotion that they become almost holy. “And it’s when we think about that object as a holy object that we start to get in trouble,” she said. “Because one does not touch holy objects.” But flowers die. Teddy bears rot in the rain and snow. Heartfelt notes blow away and become litter. Grider said people who contribute items to a memorial aren’t thinking about what will happen to the items afterward, or that someone else will have to deal with them. “It’s a very personal gesture,” she said. “And people only see it in personal terms.” As Grider began working on the bonfire memorial, the full weight of the memorial items became clear to her. She said she was fortunate that the university had significant resources, including staff archeologists, student manpower, and space to warehouse the items, as well as Grider’s own knowledge and interest. That is not the case at every spontaneous memorial site.

Mourners view the large collection of flowers that have been left at the gates of Kensington Palace in 1997 after the death of Princess Diana. Grider said that after Princess Diana died, the British government decided the reams of memorial artifacts were the responsibility of Diana’s family. Truckloads were taken to the family’s estate, which Grider said didn’t have the staff or resources to deal with the vast quantity of items. After the murder of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December 2012, the small community had to deal not only with the staggering loss, but also with a huge volume of items that began arriving through the mail or being dropped off by people who made pilgrimages to the community.

Newtown received 60,000 teddy bears in the first week after the shootings alone, and an additional post office had to be opened to deal with mail coming into the town. People arrived with carfuls of food, but had to be turned away because many residents’ fridges were already overflowing. The basement of the town hall was flooded with toys and games, all of which had to be sorted and examined by bomb-sniffing dogs before they were given out. “There’s so much stuff coming in,” town hall administrator Tom Mahoney told an Associated Press reporter at the time. “To be honest, it’s a bit overwhelming. You just want to close the doors and turn the phone off.” Within days, the United Way began asking people to donate teddy bears to kids in their own community, rather than send more to Newtown. “It is a burden,” Grider said. “I have talked to people at Virginia Tech who have said family members (of shooting victims) were overwhelmed with stuff that was given to them, and what are they supposed to do with it? What are Jewish or Muslim people supposed to do when they are given Bibles? “My impression is that people aren’t thinking in the broader terms. They don’t think, they just do. And the consequences of the mass doing are left to the community to deal with.” Through the years, several communities have contacted Grider for her advice on dealing with spontaneous memorials. Now, when a large-scale tragedy happens, she waits for her phone to ring. It usually does. “I try to avoid it,” she admitted. “At one time, I planned to write a great interpretive book on the phenomenon, but it is too hard. It breaks my heart.” On the morning of Nov. 2, officers from Canada’s ceremonial guard and employees with the city of Ottawa began gathering items left at the National War Memorial, at the spot where Cpl. Nathan Cirillo had been shot. Eleven days after his death, the memorial had grown into what media described as “a sea” of flowers and mementoes, most of which was dedicated to Cirillo.

Memorial items left at the National War Memorial after Remembrance Day, 2014. Major Michel Lavigne, who manages and oversees the national sentry program and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, said public works employees dealt with most of the flowers and wreaths, composting those that were dead or wrecked, and taking the others to veterans’ facilities. Soldiers dealt with the other items, sombrely picking up candles, teddy bears and pictures, and loading them carefully into boxes. “I have to admit this is the first time we’ve seen this at the war memorial, so it’s a little bit new to us,” said Lavigne. Some of the items were sorted at the site; glass candles that had fallen and broken had to be thrown away, notes that had deteriorated too much to keep were photographed, Canadian flags were neatly folded. From there, the boxes were taken by two soldiers to Hamilton, where Cirillo’s regiment sorted through them more fully, cataloguing and documenting each memento.