'People aren't perfect... so why do we make them out to be when they die?'

Why do we label the people we've lost as 'angels'? It glosses over the reality of our lives... I talk to Sarah Tarlow, the author of The Archaeology of Loss about this and more...

Photo by Ludovica Dri on Unsplash

I think of them sometimes, buried deep in the earth, waiting to be found. They’ve been forgotten about. When were we meant to dig them back up? Is it now? Or later? I can’t remember. But then, even if I could, I also have no idea where I’d find them: these time capsules that I created each year in primary school, the ones Blue Peter told us to create and bury. Are they something builders sometimes find? Just like how they find old bones, dusty remnants of a life once lived. 

We were supposed to select items that ‘accurately represented the time we were living through.’ If I ever pulled mine up, excavated it, there would be Spice Girls pictures, POGS, maybe a hair mascara. Things that brought me joy. But surely I was also encouraged to capture some pain? Perhaps in torn up newspaper clippings, or a letter to my future self, telling her all that I was going through (written in gel pen of course.) 

I’ve been thinking about legacy a lot recently. What parts of ourselves we leave behind, what we take with us. How important the idea of creating a legacy can be in how we choose to live our lives. How it can help us find meaning. Legacy has been a running theme in both my personal life, and my working life, the last few months. Personally, I’m wondering if I don’t have children, then what mark do I leave behind? What do I want my time on this earth to encompass? Professionally, I’ve been researching technology that allows us to craft the imprint we leave, control the narrative of how others remember us. A time capsule, I guess, of who we are. 

So if I was going to create a time capsule today, not for a period of time, but for a person, what would it include? For mum I’d have to include her pens. Fine, black nibbed tools encased in orange plastic. She ordered them specially from an office supplies catalogue, in bulk, as she loved how neat they made her handwriting. But, over time and with use, the nibs would splay, creating smudges that spread across your hands when you wrote. These dud pens were rarely thrown away, but instead scattered across the house, to be found in the most random nooks and crannies. I’d also include a bottle of Oscar De La Renta ‘O’, the dusty perfume that I’d inhale off of her soft wool jumpers, and the honey bubble bath, the bottle decorated with bees that she asked for each Christmas. 

If I sealed it there, with those things inside, it wouldn’t be accurate. I wouldn’t have done my job correctly. Because our time together wasn’t all powdered perfume and soft wool. It wasn’t always pleasant. If I were to add in the not-so-nice things, what would I place in my ‘mum capsule’? A wooden spoon, perhaps. She had a tendency, when she was mad, to throw things. I’m sure she threw a salad utensil in my direction once or twice. What else? I could add a pumice stone, she kept grey, rotting ones on the side of the bath. The skin on her feet had the tendency to go a little yellow. I can almost hear her now, saying ‘don’t type that, don’t remember me this way.’ It feels a betrayal to voice, even such minute flaws, to her being. Particularly as, for so long, I struggled to remember her at all. 

How do we accurately remember people? How do we get past this feeling of betrayal and confront the darker parts of who they were? It’s this, and more, that I spoke about with Sarah Tarlow, an archeologist and academic who is best known for her work examining death and burial. But when her husband, Mark began to suffer from an undiagnosed illness, one that stripped him slowly of everything that made him feel human, nothing could have prepared her for the reality of illness, and death. As six years after the initial signs of his suffering Mark waited for Sarah and their children to leave their home before ending his own life. “As an archaeologist, I like to get my facts right…” she writes. “But I am excavating my own unreliable memory. I cannot go back and check.” 

It was vital for Sarah to write the truth.

To write the truth we have to confront the gnarliest parts of both our own existence, and the grime of the people we love. Grief can make us tough, thorny, cruel. Illness can morph someone into a raw, unrecognisable skeleton of their former self. But it isn’t just life’s trauma that can turn out our sludgy sides. Throughout our lifetime we will see-saw between all of our personality traits, never settling on just one of them. We can be both incredibly kind and also, at times, incredibly awful. Apart from a few very rare, and notable, exceptions I don’t particularly believe in the idea of a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ person, as so much of our lives are made up of this swirl of confusing, uncontrollable and conflicting actions. We are not consistent. Who we are exists within that tangle. 

Yet, when someone dies the ‘bad’ parts are often erased away. They become ‘an angel that wouldn’t hurt a fly’ and they, so often, ‘lit up a room.’ I’m not saying these things aren’t true. But by ignoring the bad parts, only remembering someone in a golden halo, we could be (and I use 'could’ as I don’t want to generalise something as unique as grief) denying the reality of our loss, thwarting the process. Are we saying that someone is only worthy of memory when they’re at their most optimum? How much pressure does that put on us, those of us still here, to behave unnaturally pure… and destroy ourselves internally when we can’t? 

I don’t know. Much of what I write about in this newsletter isn’t for answers, but simply to ponder the question. I’d like to write please when I die, discuss my awful parts but in reality, it will be more: noooo, don’t tell people about my uncontrollable rage and yellowing feet! But then, when I think of all the many people I am lucky enough to love, and think of their flaws I also think, God, how gloriously fucked up they are.  Their dark parts make their light shine all the more ferociously.

I loved discussing this, alongside the tricky nature of memories, our cultural’s flawed attitude to death and how we need to reform laws around our right to control our own death, with Sarah. It left me circling all these different ideas and philosophies in my mind long after we ended our call. I hope you learn as much from our conversation as I did, which I’ll split into two parts, and please do go buy Sarah’s book. It’s out now and available here. 

You’ve written academic books before, but this is your first memoir, how have you found the process of writing it? 

I loved writing this book so much, I write journals, not religiously but sometimes. So I always had all these journals but, about two or three weeks after Mark died, I was talking to a friend and I was saying how angry I was that he died alone. [My friend] said “one day you’re going to write about this.” I didn’t for a long time. As I was so tired and exhausted. It wasn’t until 2021, that I thought right I’ve got these little bits [and began writing the book.] I loved the process, it’s so different from academic writing. There are no references in this book which was very liberating. Liberating to say ‘this is just me, this is my take, this is what I remember, I might be wrong and I might be missing out on a couple of things.’ In academic writing there’s much more pressure to be absolutely fair and to reference everything. It was an opportunity to write in a different style, in a way that’s more personal and literary.

I love how you describe the struggle of retaining memory, describing it as ‘boxing smoke.’ I think it captures perfectly how hard I find thinking, never mind writing, about our past and our memories…

I don’t know if it’s just that I have a bad memory, but when [I read] memoirs where people have whole scenes and conversations, I don’t know how they do it. As that’s now how I remember things. I remember life but I can’t remember whole scenes, or context as to why we were even there, and what we decided. I’d lost all of that.

For a long time I couldn’t remember anything about my mum. I felt I’d failed as I wanted to remember her correctly but I couldn’t. I loved the part where you talk about the clippers, and wondered how your archaeological mind helped you find your memories in grief?

[CATRIONA NOTE: in the book Sarah writes “for archaeologists our material typically relates to small-scale incidents, or the lives and deaths of individuals… By looking in forensic detail at a moment, an event, a thing, or an individual and asking why did that happen, what does this mean’ we can start to link the local, specific and small scale to national or even global cultural patterns. My own story is really nothing more than a ragbag of moments, objects pictures in my mind… one object of my micro history might be this electric clipper…” 

She then uses the clipper to demonstrate how throughout their life she used it to cut Mark’s hair, as he didn’t like to pay for haircuts, how she often resented doing so on top of a lot of other labour in the house but also how, when she was younger, she enjoyed running her hand across his neatly newly sheared hair. “The clippers no doubt carry physical traces of Mark… [but they also] tell story of Mark’s financial caution but also bear witness to a problem of communication or empathy in our relationship… The clippers, and other artefacts I have, scaffold my memory, but also leave space for me to fabricate, to be the archaeologist who loves too much, who make history as she would want it to be, rather than what it was.” It made me think about the objects we surround ourselves in a different way, something I wrote about in last week’s letter.] 

I’m not very bound up in material things, in the way lots of people are. I didn’t find it hard boxing up [Mark’s] possessions, or giving them away. I don’t know if that’s because I’m an archaeologist. But things do own stories… Just now me and my boys are trying to sort the house out as we’re putting it on the market. We’ve been trying to get rid of our accumulated stuff around the house. Part of that is sparking all these memories, and we talk about dad and the old house, which is nice.

You write that “emotion is what gives taste, shape and smell to human experience,” but I find that it can be so hard to capture and retain how we felt at any given moment of time. When we are trying to remember someone we tend to think of holidays/moments etc but perhaps we’re thinking about the in the wrong way and instead we should focus on how someone made us feel… 

You’re right. We focus on events, like we’re reporters and trying to do accurate reportage on the past. But what matters with memory is feeling, I think that’s why people like sensual memories, such as taste and smell, as they can take you to a feeling of the place. 

You say that Mark remembered his life through taste and smell, and as a result of his illness he lost those. That must of been a huge grief for him to go through… 

A huge one. We knew it would be sad, but I didn’t realise how strong taste and smell are to our lives, and I’m sure that will have contributed to his bad state of mind over the last few years. 

You manage to capture Mark’s good parts and also his bad parts, which I really admire as I think it’s important - though difficult - to paint someone as a whole rounded person who made mistakes or who was flawed in their character… 

It felt like if I didn’t include the bad parts of him then it would be an untrue memoir. It was one of the things I found frustrating when looking through other grief memoirs when I was searching for people to identify with. [Often] what I found was this whole ‘oh he was so wonderful’ and ‘all my feelings are just pure.’ I needed to talk about the nasty side of him [but also] the tetchiness, the pettiness, the way that being under a huge amount of strain can make you quite scratchy. All those aspects. Mark was by no means a perfect partner, he was so clever and he was so selfless, and there were many things that made him wonderful. But he could also be thoughtless, angry and unsupportive and so on. As for me, I hope sometimes I was kind and thoughtful and loving and strong. But I was also self pitying, and tired and really grumpy and bad tempered. It was important for me to include all of that.

I definitely think it will be something many people will relate to. My mum died of a brain tumour and it definitely changed who she was, over time. I could see our story in the line “I wish that nasty man had not tried to occupy Mark.” But I definitely feel guilty when I think of the moments her illness made her cruel, or not herself. As it wasn’t her fault. But then the way I feel isn’t my fault either… (I elaborate on this a little more in next week’s newsletter)

It’s really early days [since the book was released] but I I have had comments from other people saying “I am really struggling with those nasty emotions and it’s great to hear someone speaking about that,” or “I’m struggling as I feel happy, and I feel as though I shouldn’t.” It’s hard as this should be the worst thing [to go through] and it is the worst thing but it doesn’t mean there aren’t moments of happiness. 

We tend to paint emotion as so binary: you’re either happy or you’re not. Whereas I loved something one of my guest posters, Suchandrika wrote, where she compared emotion to paint in a water pot, all swirling together… 

When people ask me “how do you feel” it’s really hard to answer as sometimes I feel really sad, sometimes I feel angry, sometimes I feel hopeful and optimistic… They all swirl together and it can be several at the same time.

Thanks so much for reading, part two will be released next week. Please do, as always, let me know what you think. How do you remember the people you’ve lost? What would you put in a time capsule of them?