All the Living and the Dead

by Hayley Campbell

Cracks in relationships can expand to full breaks under such stress – on this ward, people are at their most vulnerable and their most angry – and sometimes there is a push–pull tension where this blank box sits at the middle of the fight. Everybody grieves in their own way, but family members can judge each other on how they do it, can worry if someone is doing it correctly, can step in and try to take charge if they believe they are doing it wrong. The problem with the memory boxes hinges on the fact that people, sometimes, cannot agree on how much time to spend with a dead body, whether it’s right to record it, whether they should see the body at all – the crux is the idea that grief can be diminished if you try to forget, or if you literally bury it, just like Spain’s Pact of Forgetting. But historical black holes make unsatisfactory graves to bury anything. How do you move on to grieving if, without the finality of seeing, you’re still trapped in disbelief?