Patty Dunkel says she needs desperately to claim the grassy berm behind Mokena Elementary School where her son took his life.
She says she needs to visit the hill daily, decorate it with fresh flowers, light votive candles in prayer, and organize the pile of letters that accumulated under the makeshift memorial.
“This is the place I must go to mourn my son,” said Dunkel, tears welling in her eyes. “I did not get to say goodbye to my son. I did not get to hug him or tell him that I loved him. This is where I must do that, for him and for me.”
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But in the last few days, Patty Dunkel’s efforts have been impeded.
Officials with Mokena School District 159–which owns the land where her son and another teen committed suicide–told the family to remove the memorial. School administrators allowed the shrine to remain for a week after the shootings, but since Monday, maintenance workers have removed flowers, crosses, letters and pictures and given them to the family.
“We feel that the memorial draws attention to suicide and glorifies something we don’t want to glorify to our elementary school students,” said Pat Chesla, assistant superintendent for the school district. “We respect the fact that two lives were lost there, but our children are thinking that bodies are buried up on the hill and we don’t want to contribute to that. We want to get beyond it.”
The Dunkels are trying to persuade Mokena officials to let them erect a temporary memorial at the foot of the berm. They spent most of Tuesday working with town and Park District officials to obtain permission. No decision had been made by Tuesday night.
For the past nine days, Dunkel has walked about 400 yards from her home to the berm behind Mokena Elementary to honor her 17-year-old son, Shaun, who police say killed himself April 20 in a double-suicide pact with best friend, Jeff Niemiec, 19.
Tatters of the memorial sat in a 3-by-2-foot cardboard box in the Dunkels’ garage Tuesday. A homemade cross crafted from two branches, wet and trampled flowers, mud-stained letters and a poster half-burned by vandals stand as a reminder of what happened on that hill.
“If I have to buy that hill, I’ll do it,” said Daniel Dunkel, Shaun’s father. “I’ll do whatever it takes to keep the memory of my son alive.”
Erecting public shrines where deaths occur has become commonplace. Shrines sprout along highways, honoring those killed in accidents. They crop up at the spots of shootings and stabbings. And they are erected at the scenes of natural disasters and mass deaths, such as the federal building in Oklahoma City where 168 died and at the school in Jonesboro, Ark., where two kids gunned down five people.
But a memorial to two teens who took their own lives seems to elicit a different reaction.
“It would be a different story if it were some horrible tragedy,” Chesla said. “But we don’t think it (a memorial) is appropriate with a suicide.”
Such sentiments anger Shaun Dunkel’s family and friends.
“It’s like they want to sweep it under the rug, like it never happened,” said Rich Hermann, 16, a friend of Shaun Dunkel’s who visits the hill daily. “But we want to make sure they didn’t die in vain. We don’t want them to be forgotten.”
Health experts say it is important for the family and community to grieve the loss of the teens and to talk about suicide and its prevention. But they warn against public displays that could glorify suicide.
Dr. Alan Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, based in Washington, D.C., said, “Memorials may contribute to suicide contagion by giving susceptible kids the idea that the community is honoring the suicidal behavior instead of mourning the person’s death.
“There needs to be a balance between the grieving process and any action that may be interpreted as glorifying suicide.”
The Dunkels see the memorial as a necessary phase of recovery for them and their son’s friends.
“I’m sorry I have to do this, and I’m sorry if I inconvenience others, but my pain is anything but over, and I need this to get me through the pain,” said Patty Dunkel. “They keep acting like he’s a bad kid, like he did something wrong and he should be punished or forgotten about.”