Objects Of The Dead

Mourning And Memory In Everyday Life

Margaret Gibson

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780522859065
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Death in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What is the fate of objects after a death-a daughter's hairbrush, a father's favourite chair, an aunt's earrings, a husband's clothes? Why do some things stay and some go from our lives and memories? Objects of the Dead examines a poignant and universal experience-the death of a loved one and the often uneasy process of living with, and discarding, the objects that are left behind. How and when family property is sorted through after a death is often fraught with difficulties, regrets and disagreements. Through personal stories, literature, film and memoir Margaret Gibson reveals the power of things to bind and undo relationships. This is a remarkable reflection on grieving-of both saying goodbye and living with death.

1

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 consciousness—they 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 Kübler-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 objects—a chair, ring or piece of clothing—and 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 experience—the 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 one’s 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, couldn’t 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 mother’s soul’. Films, television advertisements, products on supermarket shelves—the 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.

As I progressed with interviewing and gained further contacts, it became apparent that women were more interested in and comfortable talking on this subject. Women often volunteered friends and contacted people for me. Some of the men I interviewed were reticent, avoiding this type of engagement and subject matter, which could provoke emotions or breach some deeper sense of privacy. While I think there is a gender dimension to this difference in disclosure, it also demonstrates the simple reality of some people, men and women, being more sensitive and attuned to this type of discourse and conversation. In one interview I was told quite significant, tragic things after the ‘official’ session was over. I have respected the timing of this disclosure and kept the material out of the book. One male interviewee seemed unable to respond emotionally or imaginatively to the topic—perhaps it didn’t suit the way he thought about the world. When I played back the interview I realised that he had mentioned the death of a child, a baby, but not actually talked about it. The story was there but not there, and I must have known during the interview that it was out of bounds.

All the people I interviewed spoke of a range of family deaths—mothers, fathers, partners or lovers, children, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles and grandparents. Of all the family relationships, parental deaths dominated the stories of keepsakes and grieving. Statistically, a parental death has the highest chance of representation, and this was certainly borne out by the interviews. For some of the younger interviewees, the death of a parent was their only deeply felt, life-changing bereavement. Not surprisingly, then, the death of a parent or parents tended to overshadow other bereavement stories, though many of the interviewees did touch upon them. Fathers’ deaths had the highest numerical representation, probably explained by the fact that men, on average, have a lower life expectancy than women. At the other end of the generation spectrum, deaths of children were also described. As a mother, afraid of and sensitive towards a bereavement of unspeakable depths of sadness, I initially avoided these stories.

Simone de Beauvoir’s insight of ‘the power of things’ in death has been used in poignant accounts in literature and memoir, such as in de Beauvoir’s own A Very Easy Death, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Drusilla Modjeska’s Poppy; and recently in Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, Colm Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship, The Story of Night and The Master, and Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold and What I Loved. In his memoir, A Mother’s Disgrace, Australian writer Robert Dessaix tells the story of how his father, mowing the lawn one day, stopped halfway through to start a letter to him. He ‘wrote about half a page and in mid-sentence died’.¹ Dessaix cannot read this letter from his father, and it seems to have become an object encrypted in the time of its own making. It is not just an unfinished letter but one that was never sent and thus was not quite given or received.

Despite the numerous literary treatments, there is a notable absence of sociological research into grief and material culture, particularly in the context of Australia. While there is sociological, cultural and historical research on objects in relation to death, memory and mourning, the more intimate history of grief objects through interview research (rather than through memoir or individual narratives) is limited. This is partly because research into objects and material culture has, to date, focused largely on the areas of consumption and commodity, and on the theories and practices of gift-giving and exchange relations.

Many of the people I interviewed didn’t want me to think that their attachment to objects was about materialistic values. Before the subject matter of my research was fully grasped, quite a few interviewees conflated materiality with materialism. They tended to deny or downplay their attachment to objects because they hadn’t distinguished materialism from the symbolic, emotional and memory value of material life. I suspect that a pervasive social and moral discourse against the materialism of consumer culture has distorted our ability to think about material culture and possessions more positively and diversely. After all, life is essentially material. Perhaps we need to reconnect the spiritual to the material life, reasserting a fundamental interconnection.

The material legacies of death are often quite ordinary—a vase, a tea set, a pipe, a toy, a blanket, a chair, rings, books, clothing, photos; any number of personal and household objects. And yet I wonder if this value of the ordinary is true in the case of individuals from very wealthy homes. All the people I interviewed, except for one, were from low- to middle-income families. An individual’s background may shape their perceptions and value systems when responding to the personal possessions of deceased family and friends. In other words, ordinary objects may be treasured precisely because they make up the majority of a person’s possessions.

More than half of the interviewees identified themselves as religious or spiritual; some were in limbo—between belief and agnosticism—and a few were outright atheists. Although many people described themselves as religious (most of Christian faiths) and as believing in a separate and independent afterlife of the spirit or soul of a person, they longed for the return of the absent body. Indeed, one very religious interviewee said she would give anything to have her father back. Belief in an independent spirit or soul is kept alive, indeed supported, by living memory and other material traces. We knew the deceased only as the embodied being that they were. Notions of disembodied spirit, to my mind, conceal a debt to and dependence on material existence.

The material legacies of death are overlooked or undervalued by religious beliefs that place a higher cachet on notions of disembodied spirit. Western philosophical responses to death have focused on death denial, identifying religious beliefs in the disembodied spirit as part of this phenomenon. On the other hand, death denial is often levelled at the secular world of capitalism, which promotes a culture of distraction in the excesses and in satiability of consumption. This book counters both the anti-materialism of religious spiritual ideas and the over-materialism of consumer capitalism. It negotiates a path between the secular and the religious, the material and the spiritual, aiming to question the secondary value and transcendence of earthly, material life stemming from religious traditions and ideals. It does this by showing how inseparable spirit and matter are, through stories of grief and mourning. It also grounds the spiritual in the material, offering an antidote to the gloss and gleam of consumer objects. It shows another face, or side, to objects that our visual commercial culture rarely shows. It is about those other objects, deeply connected to memories of self and others, that gain or lose particular meaning and value in death. This other life of objects—private, sometimes secret, and often unarticulated—is in some ways more pressing, more penetrating and more affecting than the desirable objects in magazines or behind shop-front windows that are supposed to occupy our thoughts and desires most pervasively; they do, of course, especially for people living in relatively affluent societies, but they also conceal the other story and meaning of objects in relation to death, mourning and memory.

Buying a dress, a shirt, jeans, shoes, a book, a saucepan, glassware—any number and type of object— involves the transference of that object from the market setting of the shop to the setting of the home. The image of the object in the shop, its lure as something of practicality, desire, status or identity, is also transferred, not necessarily without change, to the home. However, when an object loses ‘newness’ because it has been touched and possessed, it may also lose its lure as a commodity; of course, this depends on the object and the owner. Celebrity objects and possessions, antiques and collectables—these are another story. Antiques and collectables represent a particular type of commodity that has relative value according to its age, origin, singularity or rarity in number, the quality of its material and design, the reputation of its designer and the history of its ownership. It is in the antiques and collectables market that we find the fetish of the celebrity relic—the aura of the dress belonging to Marilyn Monroe captured rather wittily in the film The Wonderboys, for example.

In entering the home—the sphere of personal space and identity—an object shifts its value and status not only in its objective market value but also in its subjective value, that is, how it is regarded by its owner and user. Of course, it may cease to be noticed, becoming an object amongst other objects, commanding attention only occasionally for one reason or another. A fashion item loses its ability to please probably more quickly than the object whose function or aesthetic appeal is durable. Indeed, while commodity culture beckons us to gain satisfaction from consumption, sometimes the greatest pleasure is in the possibility of consumption, and not in its satisfaction. Consumption can be entirely unsatisfying, because it is in the space between having and not-having that pleasure resides, however fleetingly. Naturally, we can be entirely unaware of how we experience these movements of satisfaction or disappointment as we go about our looking and shopping. In our saturated commodity culture, satisfaction gained is never total or complete; it is infinitely deferred or, rather, continuous and contiguous with existence itself—being alive and desiring subjects. As the song goes, ‘I just can’t get enough’. It is a cliché, of course, to talk about the pleasure of suspended consummation in relation to sex, and it is probably as much a cliché to talk about it in the context of shopping. But there is something in this movement of objects from the commercial to the private sphere, from public display to private ownership, from the generalised other (or generalised consumer) to the particular consumer and self, that makes important connections to this book’s title—Objects of the Dead.

Everyday objects and personal possessions end up in unexpected places because of natural disasters, war and human travel. The tsunami devastation in South-East Asia in December 2004 showed how quickly human life can be transformed into debris. The objects of disasters and genocide are often experienced as unhomely or haunting, because they are reminders of trauma and its disorder, both psychologically and geographically. I refer to these objects as nomadic because not only are they signs of the travel and movement of human beings; they too have travelled, losing and changing their place of housing. Of course, all objects are nomadic in the circulation and exchange of goods and commodities. We buy things, bring them home, and when we move house they either go with us or stay. When we die, our possessions move to the homes of family, friends and strangers. Death makes all material possessions nomadic.

One of the defining aspects of modernity is increased human mobility through choice and circumstance. In contemporary Australia, for example, it is unusual for people to spend the whole of their lives in the same house. Paid work, study and love relationships are common reasons for moving house and geographical location. These moves, however, affect people’s ability to keep, in the long term, objects of their deceased family. One interviewee, Justine, lamented the fact that her travels overseas ultimately meant the loss of mementoes of her dece...