On recordkeeping
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I’m listening to the recording as I walk across campus to my office after dropping E and M off at school. In my ear buds, I hear the two of us laughing. I hear a kind of rare tenderness in both our voices. I hear her voice catch, a sob rise, and then the same from me. We reach for Kleenex at the same time, and our voices scratch and stretch with sorrow, rise and reach for means of expressing the complicated experiences we share, hum with love and care, care for our stories, for each other, and love for them: our lost babies.
My eyes are wet as I walk. I pass all the usual buildings, make my way across the crowded square at the centre of campus where people are crossing in every direction and navigation is hard at the best of times, but now, with our voices still talking in my ear, feels almost surreal. I wonder who else amongst my colleagues starts their day crying over their research? Who else is surreptitiously wiping their eyes as they fumble in their bag for their door pass?
The recordings are of interviews I conducted earlier this year with parents whose babies were stillborn or died shortly after birth. I did them as part of a research project on archives, recordkeeping and grief for which I received federal funding in my capacity as an assistant professor at a major research university.
I started researching the different ways grief and archives intersect when my own daughter, Anja, died nearly eight years ago. She died when I was finishing my PhD. I was sitting at our kitchen table trying to write one of the last chapters of my dissertation when I noticed she wasn’t moving the way she usually did. I remember so clearly what it felt like to come back to that table several days later, to open my laptop and find that chapter file open, partly finished, a remnant of my old life, the life before she died. It was sickening. It was impossible to contemplate going back to it, positioning the cursor after the last word I’d added, while she was alive (or at least before I’d known she was dead) and carrying on, adding more stupid, useless words about a subject I no longer cared about. I didn’t care about anything, then, but her.
Instead of writing my dissertation, I started a blog. After the desperate act of googling “my baby died,” I found websites — like this one where I publish now — and blogs written by other mothers and parents like me: shell-shocked, grieving, angry and so full of love that had nowhere else to go except into their words and the building of a community around unimaginable loss. I remember the anguish of hitting publish on the first posts I wrote, and the rush of gratitude and relief that occurred each time I received a comment: I see you, they said; you are not crazy; I will remember Anja with you.
In this communal remembering, fostered through all our urges to build a monument in words to children we could parent in no other way, I began to see interesting connections to my professional field. I wrote a blog post about building an archive out of my love for Anja, and I thought about how the archive was both a site of memory and a site of aspiration, a space where Anja was not only remembered, but where she also continued, in some way, to be present, to have presence and exist in the present.
Recordkeeping – and the archive — are not only about the past, but also about the future; what we keep in the archives as memory is also that out of which we build a future. For me, the mother of a stillborn daughter, her archive is a space of memory and of projection. The archive not only remembers who she was, but projects who she might have been. In the communities we built around our digital memorials, this dual temporal function is evident too; we gathered each other’s babies up into our hearts and brought them forward with us, babies I never knew — born to mothers I never knew before meeting them in their grief — present now in my life as Anja is to others.
I eventually finished that PhD. But the trajectory of my path as a researcher and academic was forever altered by Anja’s death and the grief that followed. For so long nothing felt real but her and my own loss, and because academia is an unforgiving arena where there is no time to stop or even slow down to sit with loss, I folded her right into everything I do.
My research now is focused on how people use records and recordkeeping as part of grief work, how memory is bound up in objects and stories, and on the weight of responsibility involved in the care of that memory. Each of the parents I interviewed this year shared deeply and openly and I was amazed and honoured at their trust in me to do right by their stories. It is an incredible privilege to carry those stories with me. It has also been really hard. Sometimes I sit in my office with all the lights out and cry. Sometimes, like today, I cry before I even get to the office.
On some days, I ask myself why I’m doing this: why not research something easier, something less sad, something that doesn’t remind me over and over of my own loss and trauma. But in the end, that is exactly why I do do it — for the reminder, for her memory, to keep her with me, to keep all the babies with me, to carry the stories forward and to do it with the respect and love and determination that they and their stories deserve.
I wrote a guest post for this site once. When I wrote that post, five and a half years ago, I probably hoped I’d be doing something different with my work: something easier, something less sad, something that doesn’t remind me over and over of my own loss and trauma. I probably couldn’t have imagined the fear that comes with actually needing the reminder, the worry that I will forget — even for a short time — and that in that time she will start to slip away, and slip away more each time until she is gone. I probably didn’t get yet how intimately bound up are the remembering, the sorrow, the fear, the forgetting, and above all the love; and how they always will be. I probably still don’t get it, but I sense I’m closer.
This here is a record. A record in time. December 2, 2019. Two thousand eight hundred and eighty-one days after I stepped away from that blinking cursor and a soon-to-be past life, one hand on my belly, willing her to move. I cue up the interview recording again. A moment where we are both laughing raucously at something only a bereaved mother a certain distance out can laugh at. And then we are serious again. We say his name. We say her name. We’re creating a record, carrying it forward, together.
What does it do for you to share your story, and to hear the stories of others?