grief – Anne Whitehead

24 May 202424 May 2024

Remembering a daughter

In a recent post, I observed that some of the trees in the memorial at The Angel have been marked as the ‘plot’ of an individual family, making the site feel increasingly like a more formalised cemetery or graveyard. At the heart of the wooded copse, immediately beneath The Angel, an alder tree has been surrounded by a small wooden fence and a metal plaque has been placed into the ground, inscribed with the name of a family’s daughter. This tree at the centre of the memorial garden, which commemorates a little girl, represents for me the emotional heart of the site.

I do not know the girl’s surname, or her story. I only know her through this memorial tree. Over the few years that I have visited the memorial site at The Angel, the child’s family have decorated the tree each year on her birthday with tokens of the gifts they would have given her, including a birthday balloon which records that she would have been three, and then four, years old. I have found it moving to witness these tributes, both because of the parents’ ongoing ritual of remembrance, and because of the evident care with which the objects have been chosen and placed. The annual decoration of the tree takes place in the winter months, and the bare branches of the alders mean that The Angel is clearly visible above.

This tree raises questions for me about how I represent the memorials at The Angel, which are at once both public and private. The tree is so central to the memorial site – both physically and emotionally – that I do not feel I can tell the story of the grassroots memorial without documenting it. At the same time, there is a sensitivity in relation to it, because of the nature of the grief that it represents.

In an earlier post, I wrote of artist Miriam de Burca, whose work records the cillini: memorial sites in Ireland, which were burial grounds for those deemed unworthy of an official grave, including babies and children who had died before baptism. De Burca makes meticulous and detailed drawings of clods of earth from these remote and hidden sites, which she digs up, draws in her studio, and then returns to the site once the drawing has been made. De Burca’s drawing represents not only an act of recording, but also a quality of attention. The drawing takes time – it is not the instant image of the photograph – and it requires a sustained and careful process of observation.

Following de Burca’s lead, I have chosen to draw the tributes on this tree, with each pencil sketch taking several hours to complete. I hope that these works, which record just a selection of the many objects left on the tree, both recognise and honour a family’s acts of love and remembrance.

I have pointed out in a previous post that, while objects that are left on The Angel sculpture tend to be moved, the tributes left in the trees usually remain in place, disturbed only by the wind. This is true of the objects suspended from this tree, which visitors will often hang from its branches again if they are blown to the ground. On a recent visit, a toy monkey, which had been left at the side of the path leading out of the trees and which was getting muddy in the rain, had been placed in the fork made by two branches of the tree. This gesture protected the toy, and its positioning suggested that other visitors had also been moved by the memorial, wishing to leave their own gift for the little girl alongside those of her family.

In a moving piece of writing, Marcus Weaver-Hightower – the father of a stillborn baby, Matilda – reflects on the importance of things to parents who experience baby loss. He writes that material objects connected to the baby can help parents to resist ‘a pressure from others to forget (get over it)’, as well as offering a focus when there is ‘a lack of adequate quantities of memories and few people who share these memories’ (476). Weaver-Hightower adds that some parents actively create memories by buying new toys and other baby things, which can ‘provoke memory’, and which ‘might be kept in private or publicly displayed’ (476). His words chime with the memorial rituals that I have observed at the tree beneath The Angel, and my drawings of some of the tributes that have been left there seek to register their affective power, not only for the family but also for those who visit the site and encounter them.

References

Marcus Weaver-Hightower, ‘Waltzing Matilda: An Ethnography of a Father’s Stillbirth’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 41.4 (2012), 462-91.

13 May 202413 May 2024

International Booker Prize

I was delighted to receive a recent invitation from Anna Walker, senior arts and culture editor at The Conversation, to contribute to a review piece of the books on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize 2024. I am an admirer of the International Booker not only for its commitment to literature in translation, but also for its explicit recognition of the translator, who shares half the prize with the author. This year, the judging panel was chaired by Eleanor Wachtel, and included poet Natalie Diaz and artist William Kentridge.

I was asked to review Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About, which was translated from the Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey. Readers of this blog will recognise my research interests reflected in the work, which documents the grief process of a younger twin following the suicide of her brother. Posthuma’s novel was published in the Netherlands in 2020 and was shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature in 2021. Her first novel, People Without Charisma, was published in 2016, also to wide critical acclaim.

Given its subject matter, What I’d Rather Not Think About is surprisingly readable, in part because of its tone. The narrator – known to us only as Two because she was the second born – reflects with wry humour on her situation. The book also reads as a series of interconnected flash fictions. It came as no surprise to read that Posthuma is a fan of American short story writer Lydia Davis: her prose echoes Davis’s precision, and Posthuma also shares Davis’s interest in probing questions of intimacy and distance. The brevity and concision of both writers focuses our attention on what is unsaid, as much as on what is expressed.

The winner of this year’s International Booker Prize will be revealed at a ceremony held in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, on Tuesday 21 May.

The article in The Conversation, which contains mini reviews of each of the shortlisted novels, can be accessed here.

10 May 202413 May 2024

May

This post forms part of a monthly series that documents the plants growing at The Angel of the North through a series of cyanotypes.

The new month has brought the flowering of the various springtime plants that grow on common land such as fields, parks, and roadside verges – the daisy, the dandelion, and the clover. Their familiar flowers spread across the field on which The Angel stands, reminding us of the everyday nature of this site as post-industrial brownfield land. In this post, I am interested in dwelling on the ordinariness of these flowers, not as an opening onto the history of the site, which I have explored in previous posts, but rather as a prompt for reflection on the grassroots memorial at The Angel as it relates to the ordinary.

If we turn to an influential essay on the grassroots memorial, we can see that the connection between this kind of site and the ordinary is a surprising one. Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sanchez-Carretero have marked the origin of the grassroots memorial in the 1980s, indicating that it has now become a ‘recurrent pattern’ in the wake of ‘a traumatic event or crisis’ (p. 1). Placing mementoes and tributes at the site of a traumatic event or death becomes a form of ‘social action’ that at once mourns an unexpected death and seeks to effect change, to ‘precipitate new actions in the social or political sphere’ (p. 2). Roadside memorials, for example, both mark the site of a fatality and seek to prevent future accidents by warning other drivers and agitating for the stretch of road to be made safer. The placing of objects removes the site from the everyday, elevating ‘ordinary, secular ground into the extraordinary’ (p. 21). Nevertheless, the authors point out, the primary function of the grassroots memorial is not ‘to create relations with the supernatural’, but rather ‘to manage emotions and to deal with grievances and contestation’ (p. 24).

I have pointed out in previous posts that, while the grassroots memorial at The Angel shares in common with other sites the placing of tributes in a public space in order to grieve, it is distinct in that The Angel is not the site of a traumatic event or death, but a place of comfort, and perhaps hope. The social action that Margry and Sanchez-Carretero see as central to the grassroots memorial is largely lacking at The Angel, though traceable perhaps in the possible origins of the site in a grassroots baby loss initiative. I have suggested that there may be something in the memorial at The Angel that enhances or magnifies the sculpture’s effect in transforming the ordinary ground of the field into an extraordinary place, imbued with the feeling of the sacred. But, for at least some of those who leave tributes there, the reasons are more prosaic. The Angel was particularly loved by the person who died. The ubiquity of The Angel in the media offers a sense of permanent contact with the person who has been commemorated there. There is no grave and The Angel offers a place to visit on birthdays and anniversaries. The constant presence of visitors and the memorial tributes left by others offers a sense of companionship for the dead. These are all important and understandable motivations for leaving mementoes at The Angel, but they are expressive less of grievance and social action than of the everyday practicalities of grief.

The ordinariness of the memorial at The Angel does not render it less important than those grassroots memorials that mark the site of a traumatic death, and the love expressed in the tributes is just as strongly felt. By commemorating their losses at the public site of The Angel, there may be, for some, a desire to make their grief visible to others. But this does not seem to be the primary motivation for many, and the evolution of the memorial into individual trees marked out as family ‘plots’ suggests that, with grief rituals in flux, The Angel represents an alternative to the traditional cemetery and increasingly echoes its conventions. The site offers somewhere to visit either if there is no grave – as many friends and relatives return to a place where ashes have been scattered – or if the grave of a loved one cannot easily be reached.

On my visits to The Angel, I have repeatedly witnessed visitors encountering the memorial that they had not expected to find there. Time and again, they stand quietly reading the messages that have been left and looking at the tributes. Some take photographs, but many simply observe. Often, they are visibly moved by an object or a token, or perhaps by the accumulation of tributes that they encounter. One or two have written notes and left them in the trees, recording their own responses to the site. These visitors are not responding to a social agitation that seeks to bring about change, but rather to the everyday, ordinary expression of love and grief.

References

Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sanchez-Carretero, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Memorialisation: The Concept of Grassroots Memorials’, in Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sanchez-Carretero (eds.), Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2011), pp. 1-48.

21 March 202429 April 2024

Honouring its Telling

Film still, *Where We Will Go* (2023) by Kate Sweeney

I am delighted that a special issue of the journal Literature and Medicine on the representation of pain has just been published. Edited by Sara Wasson, the focus of the volume lies not in the claim that pain is unspeakable, but rather in its varied cultural legibility – the ways in which existing cultural contexts and expectations influence what can be heard of pain’s particular stories.

My own essay in the volume looks at two poetry collections by mothers who have lost their babies – Rebecca Goss’s Her Birth (2013) and Karen McCarthy Woolf’s An Aviary of Small Birds (2014). Their experiences of loss are different: Goss lost her daughter, Ella, from an incurable heart condition at sixteen months, while McCarthy Woolf lost her son Otto at birth. In their haunting collections, both poets nevertheless adapt the form of the lyric elegy to express the pain of maternal grief. This form invites its readers to inhabit and linger in the singular moments that the poems commemorate, rather than reading towards a recovery. Both poets also address the ways in which cultural expectations of pregnancy and motherhood exacerbate the pain of grieving for a baby, because they make it difficult for the experience to be heard.

I wrote this essay as I was preparing to work with the parents who had experienced baby loss from a multiple pregnancy. As we talked with the parents in the workshop sessions, I could glimpse threads of connection between the work Kate was developing with them in the film and the poems I had been reading. The poets attend carefully to the shaping of the words on the page, and this found its echo in the parents’ drawings, using the inks that Kate had made. Their careful tracing out on paper of the names of their lost babies gave weight and form to their loss, making it tangible and constituting its own kind of poetry. The question of how to move forward from the loss also resonated across the poems and the film. The parents’ articulation of what it means to live as a family beside the lost twin echoed the closing poems of Goss’s collection, which explore how she shares with her second daughter the ongoing presence of her older sister, who died before she was born. The poets emphasise that the pain of losing a baby is heightened by the cultural illegibility of baby loss; for the parents, the complex grief of losing one twin while another survived rendered their experience particularly challenging to tell and to be heard.

Thanks to Sara for her commitment to the special issue on pain, and for her meticulous care in bringing the essays to publication. It’s been wonderful to be a part of this project.

You can read a version of the essay here.

References

Sara Wasson, ‘Pain’s Plurals and Narrative Disruption: Communicating Pain and Honouring its Telling’, Literature and Medicine 41.2 (2023). The article can be accessed here.

Anne Whitehead, ‘”Your Tiny White Vests, Unworn”: Contemporary Elegies of Maternal Loss’, Literature and Medicine 41.2 (2023), pp. 372-90.

16 January 202417 January 2024

Hands

Last week, Judith and I travelled through to Sunderland University at the invitation of Tom Fairfax to speak about the twin loss project to second-year medical students, as part of the fourth Humanities in Medicine Symposium. It was wonderful to see so many medical students there, and to participate in such a thoughtful exploration of the intersections between medicine and the humanities.

As I listened to the other speakers at the event, I found myself reflecting on hands. The first speaker, Jonathan Coates, is a general practitioner in the east end of Newcastle and a research fellow at the Durham Institute for Medical Humanities. Outlining how his medical practice had come to embrace the humanities, Jonathan explained to the students that he had taken an optional module in Medical Photography during his undergraduate degree in Medicine, which had given him a starting point to which he had later returned. Jonathan’s chosen topic for his photography project was bereavement, and on his powerpoint slide he showed a photograph he had taken of a woman’s hands for his portfolio, which comprised a quiet yet eloquent portrait of grief.

Emmanuel Oladipo, Lecturer in Clinical Communication at Manchester University, talked to the students about his own spoken-word poetry in the context of medical training. As I watched him speak and perform his poetry, I reflected on the power of gesture to convey meaning. Performance poetry can amplify and elaborate on the interaction between word and gesture in everyday communication, emphasising that gesture sometimes reinforces what is spoken, and at other times contradicts it.

Artist Kate Stobbart has long had an interest in hand movement and gesture. Her work included video pieces in which only her hands were visible, performing gestures that have accompanied the words of others – televised speeches, for example. With the words taken away, these works ask us to think about the eloquence, if not the poetry, of hand gesture. As a practicing doctor, Kate engaged the students in conversation about how her artistic attention to non-verbal communication might also feed into the consulting room.

Watching our own film with the students, I found myself attending to the different hands that appear in the work. Hands are important to Kate Sweeney, the commissioned artist on the project, and part of the ritual that accompanied parents bringing materials into the workshops involved her photographing their hands holding what they had gathered. One of these photographs was integrated into the film, and depicts a parent holding rose petals. The photograph reminded me of Jonathan’s study of hands, in that both comprised intimate portrayals of grief. In Kate’s photograph, the tenderness and protective care with which the parent’s hands hold the fragile petals is evident. The petals had been gathered by the baby’s grandparents and when I look at this image, I also see their hands, carefully picking and sorting the petals so that they can be included in the project.

Child's hand holding an object found on the beach — Film still, ‘Where We Will Go’ (2023) by Kate Sweeney

A child’s hands appear in the video sections of the film where the walks are depicted. These hands represent the involvement of the siblings in choosing and gathering the materials. The hands are exploratory – playful, even – as they test out the qualities of what they have found, and they give us a different orientation to loss. They remind us that the parental perspective sits alongside other frameworks of understanding and modes of communication.

Hand washing a crab claw in a sink — Film still, ‘Where We Will Go’ (2023) by Kate Sweeney

The artist’s hands appear in those video sections of the film which document Kate’s making of the inks. These hands are active and doing – washing and sorting materials, grinding crab shell into powder, or pouring distilled liquid through paper filters. Juxtaposed with the hands of the parents and children collecting materials, we can see the co-creative process that is embedded at the heart of our project, as different hands perform the varied tasks and processes that are needed for the inks to be made.

Doodles in ink on paper — Film still, ‘Where We Will Go’ (2023) by Kate Sweeney

This principle of co-creation is also evident in the various drawings that we see in the film, which were made either on the walks or in the workshops. In the image that closes the film, Kate overlaid the parents’ experiments with their inks in the workshops; each of them have inscribed the name of their lost baby. The ink drawings in the film gesture towards the hands that have made them, and they mark the trace of where these hands have been.

I extend my thanks to Tom, and to the other speakers, for such a rich and cohesive symposium, inviting us to think with the students about what the arts, humanities and social sciences might bring to medical training and practice. Watching the film in this context gave me a fresh perspective on the rich and varied vocabulary of hands that threads through and across the work.

23 November 202323 November 2023

Bottled Up

Rose petals in water in three jam jars — Photo credit: Kate Sweeney, 2022.

Making inks was at the core of the film that we co-created with parents who had experienced the loss of one twin from a multiple pregnancy. Workshop sessions were structured around the three stages of the ink-making process, as outlined by Jason Logan in Make Ink: (1) find ink (gathering the materials); (2) make ink (creating and bottling the inks); and (3) test ink (drawing and writing with the inks). The natural materials collected either on the walks or in other meaningful places – bilberries, buttercups, rose petals, an empty crab shell – were distilled into inks, which were in turn transformed into drawings and film animations. The memories of the lost babies permeated these activities, and ink making became its own ritual of commemoration.

The parents spoke often during the making of the film about the bottling up or repression of a grief that could not easily be articulated, because it is not well understood. Outside the family, the loss often went unspoken and even within the family it was hard to share, particularly across the generations. The inks gave a new and different resonance to what it meant to bottle up feelings associated with the loss. One parent observed: ‘having those gorgeous little bottles – bottled up feelings and emotions and places – it’s a really nice thing to have at the end of the project. The bottles are sitting on the shelf so we know that any time we want to we can go back and use those again and we know that if we see other things that we like we can make more inks. Even for anniversaries or things like that we know we can do that.’ The ‘bottling up’ of the feelings and places associated with the walks as inks created new memories, and grief was experienced not as internal, but as an object on the shelf that could be picked up and put down, used and remade.

The parents talked about the beneficial process of gathering materials on the walks, which gave dedicated time as a family to remember, and provided them with an activity on which to focus: ‘I think as an actual process, it’s a wonderful therapy tool – I’m not sure if that’s the right phrase – just to be able to spend some time somewhere that you like thinking about the loss and then having something practical to do. We are going somewhere that we enjoy being and we want to collect these materials and we are going to turn them into something completely different. It might have started out as buttercups or crab shells, but it ends up being this beautiful film.’ The transformation of the materials into something different – and something beautiful – is key to the project’s meaning for the parents.

Kate made inks in her studio from the materials gathered on the walks, and she also gave kits and instructions to the parents so that they could make their own inks, either between sessions or once the sessions had ended. One parent commented of this aspect of the project: ‘It was easy to make the inks and we did our own from the instructions and equipment that Kate gave us. I think this was something that could be given to all sorts of families and not just families that have lost a child but anybody who has lost anyone.’ While the families appreciated the creativity of what could be done with the inks – the drawing and writing that they enabled – the ink making itself seemed to be particularly helpful for navigating grief as a family, and the bottled ink was treasured in and of itself.

Babs Behan, founder of Botanical Inks, has written of ink making from natural materials:

There is something simple and beautiful about walking out onto the land and picking up fallen leaves, harvesting flowers and berries, and digging up muddy roots and then soaking them in water to extract their colour. I have seen people falling in love over and over again with these old-new ways of creating something – they love the fact that bringing more beauty into the world needn’t be harmful to the environment or to their own personal health. (p. 10)

In the context of our project, making inks transformed the bottling up of feelings about a difficult form of grief into a positive meaning and activity, and provided beautiful objects that the parents could keep once the project had finished. Like Behan, we also watched the parents fall in love with the techniques and processes of ink making that Kate introduced to them in the workshop sessions.

References

Babs Behan, Botanical Inks: Plant-to-Print Dyes, Techniques and Projects (London: Quadrille, 2018).

Jason Logan, Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking (New York: Abrams, 2018).