"There is an intimate relation between lives that are imaged as 'grievable' in Judith Butler's terms and those that are imagined as loveable and liveable in the first place."

Sarah Ahmed, The cultural politics of emotion (2014).

After we have gone, who owns our story? Who has the right to tell it?... To change it?

In "And her tears washed away his sins", I examine the public obituary as a site of new mythologies, a provocation of felt pain that is witnessed and absorbed by others, authenticating the grief of those who have loved and lost. The sum of human life is encompassed in a few paragraphs - a person's impact denoted in their symbolic roles: "father", "son", "brother", and "loved one". Where is the space for the ungrievable deaths, the ones lost but not loved: the abusive father, the estranged son, the cruel brother? When the mother-in-grief is still one of our culture's most powerfully constructed icons, can this wound exist alongside the interstitial wound of the "child-in-relief"?

The short story “Her Last Gift to Him was a Grievable Death” was written to accompany this work and is linked below.