André Lugo stood among the white marble headstones and watched the soldiers salute as they lined up next to his father's coffin at Arlington National Cemetery. He listened to the guns firing 21 times in solemn tribute.
But when he looked back on the funeral a month later, it still seemed as if something was missing.
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So one day Lugo, 21, came home and told his mother he wanted to show her something. On the back of his souped-up Ford Expedition, nearly the entire rear window was covered with a decal with silver script: "In Loving Memory of C.S.M. Ret. Edward H. Lugo, February 16, 1951-March 15, 2004."
His mother started to cry, André Lugo said.
Men and women of his parents' generation were raised to grieve in private and according to tradition: a funeral, a burial, a tombstone. These days, mourning is more personalized and, for many families, more public -- to the point that, in a trend some trace to stock-car racetracks, people are fighting the anonymity of death with a decal stuck on a car window.
Memorial stickers have become a familiar sight, particularly on rural roads, a flash of mortality glimpsed at 30 mph. "It's like a rolling tombstone," said Lin O'Neill, owner of a decal store in the small Virginia town of Chester.
Some decals say "Rest in Peace" or feature just a name and the dates of birth and death. Some hint at the person who was lost, with an image of a hockey stick, a motorcycle or a cross. "It keeps reminding everyone about my dad," said Lugo, whose father, a retired Army veteran, died in the spring.
The popularity of the stickers has grown by word of mouth: One person orders one, then a friend wants one, then a volunteer fire department and a family honoring a soldier killed in Iraq. They usually mark a sudden death, giving the drivers some comfort while reminding others of the loss -- raising awareness or, sometimes, just raising eyebrows.
"Why do people wear wide ties and [then] narrow ties? It's a fad," said Wayne Mast, the owner of a sign shop in St. Mary's County who often makes memorial decals for no charge.
It took a strange cultural mix to get to this stage in the evolution of mourning. In recent decades, counselors led by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross, who died Tuesday, helped bring death out into the open. The message changed from "Don't dwell on grief" to "It's okay to keep looking back." Now there are funeral videos, roadside memorials, personalized caskets.
Gary Laderman, an Emory University professor who wrote a book about funeral traditions, said, "We are in the midst of a cultural revolution around death."
Some say the decals started with NASCAR culture. Race cars have had numbers and sponsor decals for years. When two drivers died in the early 1990s, fans made black circles with the car numbers for their back windows. People put lettering on their race cars, "In memory of . . . "
Changing technology made it easy -- and cheap -- to customize graphics. When racing legend Dale Earnhardt was killed in a crash in 2001, fans bought all sorts of decals; his car number with a halo and wings, or a checkered flag at half-staff.
O'Neill, who lives in Chester and races cars there, made a decal for his modified Chevrolet Monte Carlo after a crew member died several years ago. "There's a void there," O'Neill said. "We didn't want to forget him."
