On a road I travel regularly a shrine once appeared of the sort we have all grown used to. There were bunches of ragged flowers in Cellophane wrappers and cuddly toys with cards tied round their necks. As the rain and wind did their work, it looked increasingly like left-over rubbish when the bins had been emptied badly. It was also obvious that to some poor mother and father it was the centre of the universe. As the months passed, freshly planted daffodils sprang from the spot.

Drivers averted their eyes from the demonstration of grief. There is a certain disdain at this new practice. It is un-British, often tasteless and, when mud-spattered, ugly. Yet there is something in the raw emotion of it that speaks of a real need to express grief. It seems there is no longer an acceptable way to do this. More than any other generation we have removed death from our everyday lives. Our families no longer die at home but move from hospital to undertaker to grave. We manage our grief and we move on. Death has been sanitised.

Glasgow's necropolis is a monument to the fact that the pain of loss wasn't always so hidden. On that tomb-laden hilltop, angels loom and stone carvings of the departed sit astride their mortal remains. People were carried to their graves in hearses drawn by plumed horses, and black-clad mourners wept for a year after cutting strands from the deceased's hair to twist into brooches, lockets and rings. Today, we would think such behaviour embarrassing and morbid. Now, when death comes, raw and unexpected, we have no acceptable way to deal with it.

Multiply shattering, shocking loss by 270, magnify it by a terrorist attack and scatter it across a small town and you have some inkling of the catastrophe the families of the Lockerbie victims were confronted with. Like forerunners of those who lost family in 9/11 they must have sleepwalked through the first days, then weeks and months. They did so with immense dignity, and when they built their memorials they were tributes to decorum.

There is a garden in Lockerbie that contains the names of the victims. There is a stained-glass window in the hall that was a temporary mortuary. Two hundred and seventy blocks of stone were hewn from a Scottish quarry and shipped to Washington, where the father of one victim built them into a memorial cairn in Arlington cemetery, which President Clinton unveiled.

Syracuse University, which lost 35 students, constructed a quiet, reflective memorial on campus.

Now Glasgow's Museum of Transport, which has an exhibit commemorating the bombing, has mooted adding to it a piece of the fuselage of the Pan Am jumbo jet, Clipper Maid of the Seas. The museum, which attracts 500,000 visitors a year, plans to exhibit the wreckage when it moves to a new site in 2010. Staff say victims' families seem pleased with the idea, but the suggestion is not universally popular.

It has been called a sensationalist move and ghoulish and distasteful. Why? Is this another example of our new-found aversion to death? Is Pompeii a haunt of ghouls? Is the Colosseum? Surely they are sites of historic interest. By the same token isn't the wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103 an artefact of history?

There is no doubt that acceptability changes according to the time that has passed between the suffering and the viewing. But by the time the chosen pieces of wreckage are removed from the police store where they are held, to be put on display, 21 years will have passed since the December night when the plane was blown up. If that is long enough for the relatives of the victims, it must surely be long enough for the rest of us. If they want or need to display a section of the fuselage, who are we to gainsay them?

The Lockerbie bombing was the worst act of terrorism in the UK and it happened over Scotland. In 1998, the year of the 10th anniversary, the victims' families cooperated with the museum to put together the existing exhibit. It features a metal detector, an airport X-Ray machine, and a package like the bomb. The names of those who died are inscribed on the walls.

A spokesman for the museum said of its plan to extend the exhibit: "This is about charting history. There will be nothing sensational. It is not about putting in place any exhibits that will cause a huge emotional response. The crash is still fresh in memory and we don't want to cause upset but every museum offers depictions of historical events. Lockerbie caused huge changes in our relations with Libya and changes between the west and the Middle East. Museums are all about remembrance. The relatives have no objection to sections of it being used providing it is done in a sensitive and appropriate way."

Current suggestions include adding a seat, black box or piece of fuselage showing blast damage. But is that an adequate or even accurate historical representation of such a momentous event? It is so restrained - but there was nothing restrained about that night. The wreckage and the victims were scattered over miles of the Dumfriesshire countryside. Many of the museum's visitors won't have been born when the plane crashed. Surely it has a duty to show them the real scale of the outrage?

Most of us, when we call to mind the wreckage, see the giant fractured nose cone of Flight 103 in our mind's eye. It is the illustration on just about every news bulletin about the on-going drama that surrounds the mystery of the bombing. Why not use it? More than a seat or a black box, it demonstrates the awesome scale of an attack that tore apart a colossal aircraft. That nose cone, more than any other artefact, tells it like it was.

Earlier generations, those more hardened to the realities of life, were more accepting of this sort of thing. Holocaust victims want Nazi extermination camps displayed for all to see. We take for granted exhibits in the Imperial War Museum in London that display bomb shelters and pictures of real people in the blitz and planes and tanks that saw action in the Second World War, within living memory.

Fifteen years ago, when plenty of First World War veterans were still living, I sat with my children in a mock-up of a trench where men had fought. We were surrounded by the sound of shell-fire and the trench shook when a simulated mortar landed near-by. It was theatre but, more than the memorial plaques I had seen in schools, churches and on monuments set in restful gardens or on small village greens, it brought home something of the claustrophobia and panic and madness of war.

Surely it is the wreckage rather than an X-ray machine or a faked copy of the bomb that will bring home to people who didn't live through it the enormity and savagery of the crime that was committed over Lockerbie.

We forget so many of history's horrors and thereby fail to learn from them. Instead of preserving an anonymous piece of metal, the Museum of Transport should make the nose cone its exhibit. It is the true symbol of the catastrophic wrong it commemorates.