We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

by Becky Cooper

They buried the dead under their houses.207 A lot of attention was paid to that dead individual, he went on. “By attention, I mean you embellish it with jewelry, with items of significance.” It struck me then that the way we relate to our dead is the oldest mark of our humanity. “The dead are kept close to you,” he said. I circled it in my notebook.

Silence, Kimberly explained, plays a huge role in her work on gender violence. “What do you do with these silences?” she asked. “How do you listen to them? How do you interpret them? When are they oppressive? And when might they constitute a form of agency? How do you understand silences as they enter and contour the archives?”

Even if we think we’re uncovering the past, what we are really doing is reconstructing it, adding our own flesh to old bones.

The closest Boyd got to admitting how much her death affected him was when he relayed a dream he’d had after she died. He was with his parents when Jane showed up. “I was trying to say in the dream, ‘Why is she here?’ and everybody said, ‘We don’t talk about that.’ We didn’t talk about what happened between us, and we didn’t talk about why she was back to life.”

Academia no longer felt like an idealized kingdom of learning; it was nasty and political.

The randomness forces me to confront the awful fact that she might have suffered. Look, it says. I can’t. I don’t want to.