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Objects of the Dead
A toy, books, jacket, dresses, pipe, cricket bat, apron, hat
When a loved one dies, suddenly their personal belongings and defining possessions come to the foreground of consciousnessthey are truly noticed. This noticing is complex and often poignant. Death reconstructs our experience of personal and household objects in particular ways; there is the strangeness of realising that things have outlived persons, and, in this regard, the materiality of things is shown to be more permanent than the materiality of the body. Most of us live with traces of the dead in the form of furniture and other objects that have always been there or have recently entered our lives and households. I am naming these objects of the dead because they were once the personal and household belongings of the living, now deceased.
Elizabeth Kbler-Ross has written extensively about the withdrawal of the dying from the world and their emotional disinvestment from material possessions. Yet for those who outlive a loved one, the objects that remain are significant memory traces and offer a point of connection with the absent body of the deceased. At some point in time after a loved one has died, one or more family members or close friends sort through the personal objects. What are the kinds of decisions made, experiences had and memories recalled in and through this process?
What is the fate of objects after a death? As remnants of lives and identities, objects of the dead sit in rooms, on shelves and in drawers. They are worn on bodies, are stored away for safe-keeping, or end up in charity shops, auction houses or on eBay. Why do some stay and some go from our lives, households and indeed memories? What do we really value when it comes to the possessions of deceased loved ones? What differences in value and meaning exist between relics that are objectsa chair, ring or piece of clothingand relics of the body itself hair, teeth, bone and ash? What of the body, if anything, do we keep? This book examines these questions as it tells stories from Australian lives. The stories are fragments of lives: memories and objects juxtaposed and in conversation.
In the pages that follow I examine a universal and often poignant experiencethe death of a loved one and the process of sorting through, living with and discarding objects that are left behind. I explore the status of material possessions as property, metaphors and symbols of love and identity, and the function and power of objects to bind and unbind family relationships. We remember, hold on to or let go of the deceased through their material possessions. Conversely, the dead continue to shape lives and households through the bequests and responsibilities they administer, through what they leave behind.
My own experience of bereavement is part of this book in both story and motivation. In 2001 my father died of bone cancer. In the nine months of his suffering and death, I wrote a diary, something I would never ordinarily do. The diary became a preface to this book, a notebook of its stirrings. I would not have embarked on the project if I had not experienced this significant death and come to understand what many others have already known before me: how everyday and commonplace death is and yet how utterly unique it is for each person to find themselves living in relation to an irreversible absence that they could do nothing to prevent this death, like all deaths, will happen sometime in the future, and then it is already in the past. Nothing blurs and structures time more than death and bereavement.
This book is based largely on interviews with Australians who have experienced significant bereavement. Some of the primary research is also derived from emails and letters. Biographical details of many of the interviewees mentioned here can be found on page 194. The interviews were partly conversations, because my own experiences were not excluded from the process. The research enabled me to explore what types of objects people value after a loved one dies, and why. Understanding what is valued also tells us about our values as individuals and, more broadly, about wider attitudes to death and material culture. A range of objects was mentioned in the interviews, and certain types held special significance. Almost everyone talked about photographs and clothing; in the light of this, I have given these particular focus in separate chapters.
The interviews revealed that some objects do not trigger feelings of attachment, or specific memories or stories, for example, most household effects that are mass-produced and occupy collective household spaces and forms of use (televisions, fridges and so on). This is useful for understanding the moral decisions and behaviours of individuals towards the belongings of the dead. No one in the interviews had any qualms about selling most household effects, but no one said that they would sell the clothes of a deceased family member. The decisions made about the fate of objects revealed a moral system whereby monetary gain should be made only on certain types of objects and under certain conditions; for example, I discovered that most personal objects become gifts to family and friends or donations to strangers through the charity economy, though it may be morally acceptable to sell clothing when poverty or financial need is an issue. Time, and emotional, relational or generational closeness to the deceased, may alter this general moral standard and code of behaviour. Thus, in terms of conscience, jewellery could be sold more easily when the seller was of another generation or an emotionally or genealogically distant kin.
There are of course other, less tangible, though no less memorable and affective, things that carry with them the identity, character and memory-association of a person. It can be a song, a turn of phrase or a gesture that when heard or seen immediately carries a loved ones image and memory. Sometimes these are welcome, at other times painful and sad. One of my interviewees, Sonia, whose daughter died tragically from a drug overdose, couldnt bear to hear the song Sweet Caroline. Stephen, whose mother was murdered, spoke of various triggers: My mourning was intense, and lingered for about fifteen years. I used to imagine that the sound of the bell on my cat as it passed beside the bathroom window in the twilight was the sound of my mothers soul. Films, television advertisements, products on supermarket shelvesthe specificity of individual lives and relationships leads to a huge variety of things that trigger memories and emotions. While I focus most on material objects in this book, I use the word thing to represent the diversity of tangible and intangible triggers reported by my interviewees.
Most of the people I interviewed came from Anglo-European backgrounds. The interviews were arranged through contacts with counselling and grief support organisations, as well as through professional and personal networks. I have changed the names of the interviewees to protect their privacy (except for a few well-known Australians). Most were heterosexual and more than two-thirds had higher education degrees.
