Memorial car decals: In honor of lost loved ones

By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer

Lionel Haili tunes up the VW that Sept. 11 attacks victim Christine Snyder once helped her husband build. Photos by Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

That VW almost ended up as scrap metal. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, it was too much a painful reminder of loss.

That was the car Christine Snyder helped her husband build.

Ian Pescaia was a racer. Nearly a decade after Pescaia and Snyder first became friends at Kalaheo High School in 1984, their friendship turned into love. He discovered her love of trees. She discovered his love of cars. They married last June and worked on the car as a hobby.

Then Sept. 11 happened. Snyder, a 32-year-old landscape and planting project manager for The Outdoor Circle environmental group, was returning from a conference on United Airlines Flight 93, the hijacked plane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field, killing everyone aboard.

After his wife's death, Pescaia couldn't bear to keep the old white VW they called Island Snow.

But the guys at the track couldn't let it go.

Lionel Haili, a 37-year-old racer who lived near the couple in Kailua, bought it, repainted it and renamed it. Then he added a sticker to the rear window that identifies him as one of Snyder's friends. Topped by a lei, it simply says: "In loving memory of Christine Snyder."

Jon Souza has the same sticker on his purple Ford Windstar minivan. People in the grocery store parking lot have recognized the name and asked him about it. So has the valet at Tony Roma's.

Souza, 39, of Kaimuki, doesn't mind the questions. He likes to tell people about the person behind the sticker and about his daughter, Christie Souza, who was born three months after Snyder's death and was named in her honor.

Therapeutic rituals

On the cars that line the parking lot of Hawai'i Raceway Park, the Snyder sticker is just one of half a dozen decals that honor the dead. Walking the lot can be like passing headstones in a cemetery. The stories behind them are as diverse.

Some cars bear the name of Kris "Infamous" Ibera, with the "R" in his first name swooped like a paintbrush stroke to represent his connection to racing.

Ibera, 22, of Pearl City, died last August after losing control of his car on H-1 Freeway. High-speed lane changing had sent him careening off roadway about a mile from the race track. He was thrown to his death. "He wanted to be a professional racer," said his mother, Revelyn Tolentino, who sees the stickers on the cars of Ibera's friends. She hasn't put one on her own car. Not yet, she said.

Other cars and motorcycles have stickers in memory of Chad Tanabe, a 21-year-old Kalani High School graduate from Mililani who died last August after crashing his motorcycle on a zigzag section of Auloa Road called "13 Turns." The stickers were Chad's friend's idea, said Chad's father, Philip Tanabe, who has placed one on the rear window of his van.

Like the black armbands and wreaths of generations past, memorial stickers on cars are a way of commemorating life and signaling that a dead loved one's life still has meaning to those left behind, said Cynthia White, director of Honolulu's Outreach for Grieving Youth Alliance. "We really live in a grief-denying society. ... This is personal. But it's also a public acknowledgement of the relationship," she said.

That acknowledgement is a healthy grief ritual that opens the door for people to talk about their loss, said Felicia Marquez-Wong, bereavement coordinator at St. Francis Hospice.

Each time she spots a memorial sticker, Marquez-Wong said, she says a silent cheer, happy that people are finding at least a small way to cope with the grieving process. "There's really no end point to grief," she said.

The satisfaction of making grief public is that others can share in it, said George Tanabe Jr., a religion professor at the University of Hawai'i who studies death rituals.

He likens the ritual of making mourning public to the reason people celebrate weddings in churches instead of having only legal bindings. "It's the same thing with death," Tanabe said. "We all have this need for having people join us in our joys and also in our grief."

A growing trend

At Aloha Signs & Graphics in Pearl City, owner Freda Field feels empathy especially for the young people who stop in and ask for stickers and signs to commemorate the dead. Field sees requests that reach beyond the racing community. Her customers have memorialized people of all ages and backgrounds. Teens ask for stickers in memory of their grandparents. Some young men asked for window emblems honoring Dustin Long, a 20-year-old Wahiawa man killed last June in a shootout with police.

Field will take the time to make the stickers for $5, even if the time involved is more costly.

She knows customer Jon Pasoquen by the nickname "Sticker Boy" because he's been back so many times. The stickers are "just to show that we care, I guess," Pasoquen, 19, of Wahiawa, said of Long, the friend he remembers for his "big heart" but whom the public remembered only for his fatal standoff with police.

The reasons car owners have the stickers are as varied as the people they want to remember.

Romeo Corpuz's car decal memorializes his cousin.

If these rolling memorials are part of a trend, the racing community is proud to be part of it. "Basically, I look for people to come up to me and ask me questions," Souza, a track official, said of his sticker honoring Christine Snyder.

Amid the revving motors and loudspeaker at the race track, the quiet story is that Souza's friends feel good about bringing an old VW to new life as they keep his memory alive.