Open grief shows modern world has one eye on the grave

An excess of the Victorian age - lengthy and very public mourning, has come full circle

But those "diamonds" are just one part of a growing industry dedicated to death. Today, 200 international experts on death, dying and disposal are meeting at the University of Bath to discuss the world's pre-occupation with the dead.

Roadside memorials are proliferating, the American television show Six Feet Under has been a ratings success and big business has become involved in the commemoration game.

The conference is the largest on the subject held since 1993 and reflects increasing worldwide interest in how human society deals with mortality.

In America, public displays of conspicuous compassion are commonplace. Other memento mori on offer include Thumbies - keepsake fingerprint impressions from the deceased, and jewellery made from extracted gold teeth.

Memorials to the dead are now posted in cyberspace - cemeteries which are visited just as often, and tended as carefully, as graves in their physical equivalents. Visitors to virtual cemeteries enter a space where public displays of grief are accepted and can be made permanent by signing the guest book.

Until a decade ago, therapists advised the bereaved to seek "closure", not to dwell on their lost loved ones and to "move on". Now remembering the dead is regarded as an important part of what it means to be a caring society. The instant shrine - bedecked with flowers, scribbled messages and perhaps a teddy bear - to commemorate a loved one, is increasingly likely to become a permanent one.

On one 130-mile stretch of the N4, the main road that links Dublin with Sligo in the north-west of Ireland, there are 50 memorials to the dead, most erected in the past five years.

In Scotland, a row has broken out over the proliferation of memorial plaques in popular beauty spots, described by mountaineers as intrusive, inappropriate and worse than litter.

Within a 100-yard stretch of a loch-side path on a Highland estate there is an engraved stone memorial slab screwed to a boulder, a shrine to someone's mother surrounded by pot plants and a plastic plaque. The Mountaineering Council of Scotland has called for a debate on the trend, which it says is destroying the very qualities that make the wilderness special.

In Iceland, giant sculptures featuring wrecked cars on one of the island's busiest roads serve as a warning to drivers, as well as a site for meditation on death and loss and the price of progress.

Tony Walter, author of On bereavement: the culture of grief, and an organiser of the conference, said: "The spread of roadside memorials seems to be happening in many countries round the world. But it is not the same in each country, so they are not copying each other. We don't have anything here like Iceland's giant sculptures."

"In Australia, a more secular society than the UK, most of the memorials have crosses, as they do in America. In England they are much less likely to feature crosses. On a bridleway near where I live in Bath there is a small stone memorial with the name of a girl aged 17 engraved on it. I don't know how she died - perhaps she was thrown by a horse, or murdered - or who put it there or whether they had permission," he added.

Dr Walter said that after the excesses of the Victorian age, when mourning was a lengthy public ritual, especially among the upper classes, and which dictated the clothes they wore and the functions they attended, the 20th century saw mourning become a private affair, shared only by those close to the deceased.

"Now the outer trappings of grief seem to be coming back again. People who bought into the 20th-century idea that grieving should be private find it all unseemly. There is a battle going on over how people should grieve."

Una MacConville, of the University of Bath, who has studied roadside memorials in Ireland, said: "They mark the place of death because that is important for the family.

"The sense of shock associated with the place does not end. When people die in places like hospitals there is no opportunity to put up a memorial."