AN OLD CHEST
Seeking solace, or mercy, in grief
A trunk of my daughter’s things sits beside me as I type. The items it contains are sacred not for themselves, but for their echoes. She treasured this, I think as I run my fingers over a bit of cloth or a beloved book. Her hands were where mine are now. The act is tangible, tactile and comforting. Jess died in 2015.
Here rests in this chest
much that was yours;
sacred and silent:
like you, undisturbed.
Your dress in this chest,
camisole in your coffin.
Your little shoes
never to remove.
Each day from this chest
I lift dress after dress;
seeking sorrow, perhaps:
or solace or mercy.
— Friedrich Rückert
Keepsakes are natural. There is no time limit to how long such items remain in the home: months, years or for the rest of our lives. Such small memorials may seem odd to casual observers. “Not getting over it,” they may sniff. “Complicated grief,” they intone knowingly. This is nonsense, of course. Memorabilia may be surprisingly helpful. I am reminded of the black dress that author Jana Riess wears only to funerals. “Each time I wear it to mourn someone I’ve loved,” she wrote, “it becomes that much more steeped in love and history. It’s an object made sacred by its proximity, again and again, to death.”
While my daughter was alive, our home was festooned with Jess things: artwork, certificates, newspapers and magazines with her model shoots, handwritten notes, doodles, knick-knacks, and photos, photos, photos. There is no reason for this to change now that our relationship is one of loving in separation. In fact, to take reminders of Jess down from my shelves would be odd — as though with her death I would somehow sponge away her life as well.
Removing our treasured memorabilia can also be damaging. It is easy to dwell too much on negative or unpleasant memories that we wish we could change. Such ruminations may lead to brooding, self-recrimination and remorse. However, guilt offers no solutions and no hope.
The vital difference seems to be in the emotions invested in these inanimate items. A transitional object, relates J. William Worden with Harvard Medical School, is a comfort as we adjust to life without our loved one, such as a favorite stuffed toy, a blanket or treasured clothing. A linking object, on the other hand, may veer dangerously close to imagining that our dead loved one is the object itself — with resulting anxiety and emotional breakdown when the object is removed. Healthy mementos may be put away when the time is right, which might in fact be never.
Photos, treasures, creative efforts such as art or poetry, may be helpful and productive. They allow free expression of many damaging emotions that, if not faced, may fester and canker. They also remind us of those many happy moments that are all the more precious in our loved one’s absence. They speak to us of hope for a continuing bond in this life and a future reunion in the next.
“You never want to forget. You never will forget. Because all you have are your memories. It should be your task to make them good and give them substance so that others too will never forget.” — Ronald Knapp, Beyond Endurance: When a Child Dies
NOTES
Adapted from Songs on the Death of Children: Selected Poems (McFarland, 2022): 89–90. Text & translation © 2022 by David Bannon. Image: Attic Chest by Baptiste Chauveau. Riess, Jana, “Death and the Little Black Funeral Dress,” Flunking Sainthood (Religion News Service, 29 November 2022). Linking and transitional objects in Worden, J. William, Children and Grief: When a Parent Dies (Guilford, 2001): 85–6. Photos, treasures, creative expressions in Stepakoff, Shanee, “From destruction to creation, from silence to speech: Poetry therapy principles and practices for working with suicide grief,” The Arts in Psychotherapy 36(2) (2009): 105–13. Knapp, Ronald, Beyond Endurance: When a Child Dies (Schocken Books, 1986): 208.
