Week 8

Every person has or will experience a death of someone they know and love. Death is a universal occurrence and so is the mourning that follows such tragedies. Gravescapes, memorials and the landscape surrounding them, is a form of communication. Morris says, "Gravescapes-memorials and the landscape contain- ing them-provide an ideal setting for unraveling such patterns of communication because each memorial is a sacred symbol given both to the deceased and to the living." Meaning that the memorials communicate the past to the people in the future. For example, a memorial on the side of the road tells passer bys how the person died and when. Then when people add flower and pictures and letters to the memorial they add to the conversation by expressing how greatly they were loved and by whom. The memorials may not have very many words but when studied it can be read. Due to the fact that there is not a lot of actually writing included, besides the basic information of who died and when, I do not believe memorials can be seen as everyday writing because they can be redone multiple times.