When I was 16 two of my friends died when the car in which they were passengers flipped over. I was in the car behind. The driver of their vehicle raced off to beat us home, a challenge the driver of the car I was in didn’t accept. We didn’t see the crash occur, but we were on the scene within moments.

Almost 30 years later there are things I remember vividly, though my mind has thankfully managed to filter out the more gruesome visual detail.

I recall the paramedic hunched inside the overturned Torana, with petrol raining on him from the ruptured fuel tank, trying to save my best friend’s life. When I asked how he was he looked at me sympathetically and replied “he’s pretty sick mate.”

I also remember the young fireman with tears in his eyes as he put a bright red ambulance blanket over my other friend. His white, size-11 Adidas Rome runners poking out of the blanket provided a hint of how tall he would have been had been allowed to live beyond 15 years.

To this day I shudder when I drive past the crash scene, which is why I can’t understand the recent tendency for people to mourn friends killed in car accidents at the location of their death.

It’s important for young people to get together when such a tragedy occurs. When you’re a teenager or young adult your peers can be a bigger comfort than family. But I can’t fathom how gathering at the scene of the tragedy would do anything but cause further grief and even anger if there was someone at fault.

As teenagers my friends and I always gathered in a local park after school. In the hours and days after the tragedy that’s where the rest of us met to remember the good times and tried making sense of our buddies’ untimely death.

When we weren’t talking we silently stared at a big gum tree, which we had once agreed would be used, through unnatural movement, as a sign of an afterlife should one of us die.

We didn’t seek to make our grief a public spectacle, or create a shrine of material goods to show that we cared. We understood each other’s anguish and didn’t need to demonstrate it with tacky sentiment. Silence spoke volumes.

We were too young to have cars. The crash occurred on a school curriculum day and a mate suggested we go with two of his Safeway workmates to a McDonalds in a neighbouring suburb for lunch – talk about a terrible sliding doors moment.

If I did have a car, the last thing I would have done was pay tribute to my dead friends by doing burn outs, as happened after a triple fatality in Werribee last month. And if we were a few years older I would not have placed a few cans of Bourbon and Coke as a tribute - David and Tom deserved way more respect than that.

Putting flowers against a power pole and spray painting your dead friends’ names on a nearby fence is hardly a fitting tribute to anyone’s memory. Perhaps though, in this age of social media, personal reflection is not enough. Maybe to not demonstrate your feelings is to be accused of not caring. What you end up with is young people trying to outdo each other on the grief stakes. The roadside shrines become more about the mourners, than those being mourned.

I can understand an initial gathering at an accident scene for people to make sense of what happened. However, I don’t understand why people need some kind of memorial service and lasting tribute on the roadside. There isn’t this desire when people die in other circumstances.

Let’s face it, apart from the circle of family and friends no one else feels the same way about the lives that have been lost. They don’t want their streets and nature strips resembling a makeshift gravesite and a constant reminder of death. It’s why we have cemeteries and memorial parks.

Then there’s the argument that roadside tributes are a distraction to drivers – a fatal accident in Lynbrook in 2009 was attributed to a roadside shrine for the victim of an accident a week earlier. Police and council workers were abused when they removed it.

Friends and families are subjecting themselves to further heartache by placing objects in public places where they can be removed, defaced or damaged by the impact of passing traffic.

I guess what I’m trying to say to young people caught up in such tragedies is stay classy. Don’t turn your friends’ deaths into a sideshow. Be sure they’re remembered for the short lives they led, their wonderful attributes and their aspirations. The last thing you want is their existence to be defined by the horrible way it ended.

There are so many ways you can honour them besides placing stuffed toys, rotting flowers and alcoholic sacrifices, and turning on the media which you’ll no doubt attract.

Several years after the accident I spent two years overseas and not a day went by when I didn’t think of my mates. My travels were inspired by a desire to ensure the destiny that spared me from being in that green Torana wasn’t in vain.

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