On April 15th 2022, my grandmother Bernadette died, two months shy of her ninety-sixth birthday. She was my last living grandparent. I booked a trip, that week, to Paris, because I wanted so badly to be in her home city.

Methods

A first step towards ethnography is the somewhat nebulous concept of “being there”; that is, immersing oneself in the field site as much as is possible. To that end, I spent many hours walking around Paris, scouting the locations that I had associated with my grandmother: her childhood homes, her old schools, her gardens and playgrounds, etc. In these places, I took notes of how I felt, what I remarked, and what I remembered. I also spent a lot of time in cemeteries, both at Père-Lachaise in Paris (where I took notes reflecting on death rituals, memory, and remembrance in general) and at Lakeview Memorial Gardens in Pointe-Claire, where she was entombed.

1 - Telling Stories

To start, let me stress that my grandmother was a keeper of stories.

I learned about the world through her, through her experiences, her retellings of them. I learned of the Second World War through her tales of the Germans capturing her father when she was a young teenager. I knew about Vichy France and the bombings because she told me of how she strapped her siblings to her bike and got them through occupied territory into safety. History was in the paintings she hung, the books she read, her VHS tapes of Petra and the Paris Catacombs and Machu Picchu. She was a doctor, virologist, feminist, and natural philosopher.

So when the storykeeper dies, where do the stories go? What happens to them when there is no one left to remember?

I remember, on the first day of my first archaeology course, the professor asked us to write down five objects that we felt represented us. I don’t remember my answer: perhaps a book, a hair clip, a tube of lip balm… Once the task was completed, she asked us if we thought our five items would be enough for a future archaeologist to reconstruct a complete biography of our life. The answer, we quickly realized, was most probably not.

I feel frustrated, then, when I think about Bernadette’s enormous life. How can I retain the fullness of who my grandmother was? How can I preserve the whole of a life, especially one as incredible as hers? Where can I store all of my memories, make sense of them, and share them to keep them alive? I think back to my anthropological training: in prehistoric archaeology, all that remains is the measly material record. In historical archaeology, we might get both that record as well as written sources, tangible reflections from the people in the past. What I have is a bit of everything: a material record comprised of the few trinkets and treasures she left behind, a written record consisting of hundreds of pages of notes and letters, and my own mind, twenty-four years of intimate memory. There is no medium in existence, I think, that could sufficiently accommodate the entirety of her life. And yet, it doesn’t stop me from trying to trap the memories in amber.

2 - Where Does Memory Live?

I spent thirteen days in Paris almost completely alone.

I used the loneliness as a blank slate - with few demands on my time, I created an itinerary suited to my project. Like my grandmother once did, I visited all the museums I could. I found the church where Bernadette was baptized at Saint-Germain-des-Près. I tracked down the addresses of the family homes on the Rue d’Assas and Boulevard Raspail. I wandered into the parks and gardens adjacent to her apartments, including the Jardin du Luxembourg. I spent time with family, people I had not seen for more than a decade.

In the Jardin I meandered, wondering which trees my grandmother used to sit beneath, which brambles in the garden she might have preferred for the juiciness of its raspberries. In the main thoroughfare, a parade of children on ponies passed through and it prompted a memory, an old black-and-white photo that my mother had discovered a few months earlier. I pulled out my phone to compare: on that same thoroughfare in the early 1930s, there sat Bernadette behind a little pony (looking back now, that is 100% a goat) of her own, dressed in furs and staring down the camera.

Everywhere I went, I was hunting connection. As Maddrell and Sidaway (2010) have argued in their work on contemporary deathscapes, mourning is both a spatial concept that is intensified at specific sites related to death, but it is also a feeling that follows us wherever we move through the world. I was obviously aware that these locations would have been familiar to my grandmother and that she probably knew them very well. But everywhere I went, I was constantly interrogating myself as to whether I felt anything, any identifiable rush of love or oneness. I suppose I imagined that I would step off the plane in France and suddenly feel a powerful connection to my grandmother - and sometimes I did, but mostly I did not. I realize now that I was seeking a simple solution for my grief, as if it would ever be quite so easy. This left me wondering: what do I have to do to find that connection?

Having a physical location that is uniquely tied to the memory of a loved one is important - but it is also frustrating. It is never enough, always a hollow echo of the relationship you once had. This is a frustration that I have felt, to a lesser degree, all throughout my path as an early-career archaeologist. In archaeology, we study the dead, the ones who are wholly incapable of ever answering our calls. There are living descendants, living populations, yes, but communing directly to the individual in your care is an impossibility. There is no alternative except to accept the not knowing, to accept the silence and ambivalence. It is impossible to resurrect someone, archaeologist or grieving granddaughter. I know that, clinically. But when the grief is real and overwhelming, when all you can think about is the fact that you will never see your person again, you truly come to understand that there will never be a reply.

This realization is, unsurprisingly, quite heartbreaking.

3 - Changing the Flowers

I am trying to get my mother to move to British Columbia. Her sister lives there, and she would like to retire in a quaint house on the quiet Pacific. There are a few roadblocks in the pursuit of such a goal but the main one, my mother cites, is Bernadette’s grave. “You’re staying in Montréal, right? Someone has to be here,” she asks me. “Someone has to change the flowers.”

My grandmother’s grave is a polished stone slab made of ashes and it lives in a granite niche. On the front of the niche, we inscribed a sweet message in bronze with my grandmother’s name as well as my grandfather’s, even though his own ashes are buried between tombstones in a Canadian military cemetery in Normandy. There is a small metal vase affixed to the plaque and every few months, my mother buys plastic flowers from Dollarama and switches out the bouquet. (Real flowers would die almost immediately, us being in Canada.)

Why does my mother feel responsible for changing the flowers? What is this obligation? As Brennan (2019) frames it, the materiality of grief is a kind of performance or ritual which gives shape and possibility to feelings that are simply too big to look in the eye or to make sense of. Rituals of grief incorporate material “gestures, actions, or objects” (2019: 222) that function as kinds of tools for expressing the un-expressible.

For my mother and I, I understand the flowers to be stand-ins for an interaction with Bernadette that we can no longer have. It is a ritual that brings us back to the grave, that creates obligation on our part in order to honour a new kind of relationship with our matriarch. Kjoersgaard (2019: 115) refers to this phenomenon as keeping a loved one “socially alive”. It is the reason we are tethered to Montréal: if we go, the obligation goes unfulfilled and, in a certain sense, the relationship risks dying along with her.

4 - What is Memory?

My grandmother was a firm atheist who despised religion - especially Catholicism - and believed in nothing but science. She was also sure that death was the absolute end, that there would be no afterlife for her. The way she explained it: when she was gone, she would truly be gone. (“Throw my ashes into the Saint-Lawrence, for all I care.”)

Bernadette died at 95 in a care facility. She owned little by that point, an entire life split up and divided many years before between her children across Canada. I chose to keep some of her knit sweaters, and some books and magazines we had enjoyed when she was alive. One day, I will inherit her ring, a family heirloom from France dating to the early 1800s. These small tokens are most of what I have to remember her by.

Davies (2019: 253-255) argues that the act of gift-giving creates a living, dynamic “force” within that object and between the giver and receiver (see also: Brennan 2019). This is certainly true for me: the gilded copy of Jane Austen’s Emma that Bernadette gave to me for my thirteenth birthday is one of my most prized possessions. But I have to make the distinction that she did not give me anything after her passing: I chose it, asked my mum for it, and took it. I treat her sweaters with care when I wear them but I do not feel a proximity to her like I do within the pages of Emma. That book is one of the few material gifts I ever got from her, and it is perhaps the thing that makes me feel closest to her memory, so to speak (Hockey et al., 2010). To me, this book is almost holy.

I like to go sit on the bench in front of the niche where Bernadette is buried, listening to her favourite French music on my phone. But when I do, I would not say that I feel her there, and this fills me with guilt: I should feel her presence, since this is the place we have chosen to dedicate to her. However, we only placed her ashes there after the funeral. Living Bernadette had no bond to this place - really, it’s another one of the dozens of green cemeteries dotting the highway. Knowing this makes it hard for me to feel any connection here. The only emotion I truly feel when I look at her plaque - aside from sadness - is pride. I may not feel her presence, but I believe that having a physical location with which to associate her existence is emotionally important and even cathartic. On a material level, this is something I deeply appreciate: giving grief a place to go.

In those spring months of 2022, I experienced the same frenzied urge that humans have felt for thousands of years to commemorate their dead. We grievers cannot always articulate what we hope to achieve with such a commemoration, but we know in some part of us that it is the thing which must be done. I suppose, for me, the point of the grave is this: we affirm that our Bernadette was real, that she was loved, and that we want the world to know this about her. And I suppose, given what my grandmother’s beliefs on the afterlife were, that is the best we can do.

5 - Conclusion

In the past year, I have returned many times to this quote from Mary Leighton (2010: 98): “The act of remembering (re)creates a person in the present”. In writing this autoethnography, I suppose I have recreated some version of my grandmother: the one I knew, the one I grew up with, and the one I heard new stories about. She was the keeper of knowledge, wisdom, history, and anecdotes - an absolute walking encyclopedia. In the absence of her, my re-creation of her (however incomplete) is all that I have left.

On a personal level, I think this project has helped in my healing from grief. While this journey is certainly non-linear and neverending, embarking on a project of biography has benefited me immensely by allowing me new relationships with my family members, prompting new explorations of Bernadette’s life, and helping to regulate my grief in a manageable way that feels befitting of who she was.

As an anthropologist and archaeologist, this project has also been immensely beneficial in dissecting my own attitudes and emotions towards death, memory, and identity. These were once mere theoretical exercises and inquiries, but applying them to a lived experience has shown me the absolute depth and breadth of these subjects. It instilled in me, I think, a deeper appreciation for just how emotional archaeology is and must be.

My sincere hope is that I have done my grandmother justice in my portrait of her, although I suppose I will never know if I succeeded. But who knows? If she was wrong about the afterlife, I’m sure she’ll have a well-meaning yet comprehensive checklist of what I got wrong waiting for me when I see her.