Death and the Archivist
Reflections on loving the dead and the ghosts we chase.
New England is a land of spirits, typical of any region so old and so disenchanted. When the bright colors of autumn fall upon the old burying grounds and the rolling landscape beyond them, every town has a ghost story they’re quick to proudly retell around a bonfire or on the hay bales at the pumpkin festivals held throughout the month of October.
I grew up on such ghost stories, contemplating the relationship between the living and the dead for lengths of time perhaps unbecoming for a young girl. I’d often stroll around the old cemetery near my house, looking at the tombstones and trying to parse together the names behind the lichen. I wanted this place to be haunted, wanted one of those souls to rise up from their graves and tell me their stories.
As an adult, I have come to believe that places are often not haunted as much as people are.
Indeed, we are all haunted. We carry the dead with us wherever we go. Most of us walk around with wounds in our hearts cut there at some point in our lives by grief. Too well have I felt this cold knife. Too well has my soul known the horrific ways you can lose someone.
But you can also miss someone you never met. Grieve someone you never spoke to. You can spend days and weeks at your desk with the image of a deceased stranger lingering in the back of your mind. In two years of being an archivist, I have learned that sooner or later, the dead will haunt you, and you cannot choose who you are haunted by.
It’ll start as a hook. Perhaps you’ll be researching a place, or an event, and something will catch your eye as you sift through thousands of records and documents. Maybe it will be something they wrote, or a story written about them in the local papers, but it will exist as an itch in the back of your brain. Maybe the way they phrased something in their letter reminds you of your mother’s texts to you. Maybe the way they died was heroic, or they achieved something outlandish in life. The itch gets worse, and something becomes clear, you must know more.
Who were you? You ask no one in particular. What were you like?
Sometimes that question is answered with a dead end. There are not enough sources to help you down the rabbit hole and you are left at a standstill as that spirit you chase fades off into the ether. Sometimes, however, there exists enough information that you can begin to put the pieces together and stitch together some image of the person in your head.
Sometimes you two can become close friends.
It is not unusual to develop a fondness for your deceased muse, especially if their lives become intertwined with your own. A local biographer, A.H. Saxon spent years researching the showman P.T. Barnum, remarking that if he had not felt some closeness and fondness towards his subject, he’d have not spent so much time reconstructing his life. So dedicated was he to his research, Saxon at one point partially joked with the then president of Mountain Grove Cemetery where Barnum is buried, that he would not mind for his final resting place to be close to the entertainer’s. The director obliged, giving Saxon a plot of land adjacent to Barnum’s final resting place. A headstone that reads “Gone with Barnum” now stands there, waiting for the day Saxon will inevitably join the man he spent a lifetime documenting.
I have yet to become so attached to any of my subjects, as I’ve come to believe that you are not so much missing the person you never knew, but rather the idea of them.
Most don’t realize that death does not only remove you from this physical plain, it removes fundamental pieces of what you were as well. Your strengths and your flaws alike fade from memory and disappear into the ether of eternity. No one, excluding God, really knows you anymore after you’re gone. You will exist in the things you’ve left behind in this world and in the biases of those you’ve interacted with. Maybe through your own writings. Maybe oral testimonies, or stories written about you, where the living can call you a bastard or a saint depending on how you treated them. Maybe in the objects you willed off to family members, giving some insight into what your hobbies and passions were.
Regardless, you are now an image to be perceived. Nothing more.
In 1862, British inventor John Henry Pepper came up with a technique that would pack theaters by bringing specters to the stages. To achieve this effect, Pepper would set up two platforms. The first was the main stage the audience would view, with a sheet of glass positioned at a forty five degree angle in front of it. The second, would be a stage underneath, where an actor dressed as a ghost would wait for their scene. When a light was shown on them, their reflection upon the glass would appear spectral and translucent, and give the effect of interacting with the actors on the main stage. This illusion was called the Pepper’s Ghost, and would be the harbinger for a craze of Victorian spirit photography in the years that followed.
In death, one likewise becomes Pepper's ghost. An illusion. A reflection of the real thing, existing only in the parts of you viewable to the living. Realizing this is another hard lesson one learns as an archivist. You can be haunted by the dead, you can think about the dead, but you cannot raise the dead– only create a tulpa.
So how do you love the dead? Distantly. Longingly. Incompletely.
You love the dead in the way that you let sand slip through your fingers. You love the dead the way that you marvel at a spectral illusion. How easy it is to love a mirage. How simple to adore a concept, an idea of someone. This is why the dead make such easy companions. They don’t ask much of you, and if you are not careful, you can make them whatever you want them to be.
Perhaps the dead do not long for us as we long for them. Perhaps there is no need for them to struggle to understand when they have the certitude that we do not. They instead keep their vigils, beckoning us in our great shambling journey to join them in that eternal winter where all our clouded eyes will be affixed east, joyously awaiting the spring to come.