Do monuments and memorials need to be noticed, to have attention on them, to have effect? Surely they also have power when an only half-seen part of how things are. A case in point is the Cenotaph in London, an empty tomb surmounting a flat-topped obelisk. Thousands pass it daily, few take much notice, its presence is ordinarily silent and ‘there’ in an un/seen way, but then in a sense it is ‘visibilised’ and brought into public life on commemorative occasions. The monumentalism of stone gives the impression of permanency, that those events are over and now being commemorated. But actually commemoration is a public continuation of the event and not a marker of its total cessation. Compare with the extraordinary but usually transient presence of roadside shrines to people who have died in these public places. They disrupt the ordinary by making acts of private grief and mourning part of public space and place. But over time, often short periods of time, the flowers fade, the teddy bears and other toys become bedraggled, the smashed bicycles are vandalised, and the remnants of the shrines are quietly removed. They are there puncturing the background one day, and gone the next almost unnoticed in the public sense, though the private grief and mourning will remain.