When palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke looked back over her notes typed hastily pre-dawn in the midst of a global pandemic, she expected to find only darkness—an unrelenting stream of death and despair. To her surprise, her insomniac’s diary was “illuminated by pinpricks of light”. “People began to organise, street by street, village by village, to make sure that their most vulnerable neighbours…were safe and fed and kept from harm”, writes Clarke. Rainbows appeared in windows up and down the country in support of key workers, volunteers set to work sewing masks and manufacturing visors, and a retired British Army officer approaching his 100th birthday united a divided nation by walking laps of his garden to raise money for the National Health Service (NHS).
Clarke, who embarked on a career as a current affairs journalist before beginning medical training, has since punctuated her medical career with writing—from Your Life in My Hands, charting her experiences as a newly qualified doctor, to Dear Life, exploring death, grief, and the things that truly matter at the end of life. Her latest work, Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic, spans the 4 months from New Year’s Day 2020 to the end of April that same year—a fleeting snapshot of a time during which life in the UK changed immeasurably.
“Pacing the kitchen and tapping a keyboard became a kind of nocturnal therapy”, she explains. These notes, typed “fast and furiously” while her family slept, open a window to life in the UK in its darkest hours. Turning the pages of Breathtaking, we relive the angst and uncertainty of those early months. The anguish about personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing, death tolls rising too high to take in, and the sudden, unexplained obsessions with baking bread and accumulating toilet paper that swept the nation. But, for those of us who know COVID-19 in only an abstract sense, following the news from the safety of our homes, Clarke gifts us a unique glimpse of life in the eye of the storm. As the crisis evolved, day by day, week by week, we learn, in real time, what life was truly like for those on the frontlines—those who risked everything, not knowing that they would see the other side. “To us”, she explains, beyond statistics and modelling, “the pandemic is a matter of flesh and blood. It unfolds one human being at a time”. In these darkest of times, Breathtaking shows us that the greatest sources of light came from within the NHS.
Beyond the inestimable challenges of treating a new disease, acquiring knowledge on the run as patients lurched from one physiological crisis to the next, health-care workers fought—through the physical barriers of masks, gowns, and distance—to restore the humanity to their practice that COVID-19 so cruelly stripped. Overnight, hospitals cleared of visitors, carparks emptied. For Clarke, whose work in palliative care has made her all too aware of the power of human connection, seeing patients isolated from their loved ones feels like a psychological assault. “Covid even steals the patients’ names. So great are the risks of communication in PPE that it is safer for the nursing team to use bed numbers to refer to the human beings for whom they care”, she writes. Humanity is restored by any means possible: medical students volunteer to liaise with patients’ families, many of whom are self-isolating and alone; hearts knitted by volunteers are used to symbolise the connection between patients and their families; health-care workers add laminated photos of their faces to their plastic gowns. “Our tools are uncertain and improvised”, she writes. “We use whatever we can to draw people back together and we refuse to settle for despair.”
Clarke’s style is intimate and generous, opening up to us her own home and family life. We join her pacing in her kitchen—glued to her phone—as she watches events unfold, first in Wuhan, then Lombardy, and finally on her doorstep. We watch her conceal her anxiety from her husband, guilty at even an insignificant deception. We feel her exasperation as PPE at the hospice runs perilously low. We feel her overwhelming desire to help, which drives her to volunteer on the frontlines. Misty-eyed, we’re there as she attempts to quell the fears of her 9-year-old daughter, terrified of losing her mother. “How can I possibly tell her I have volunteered, that I want to be the one helping these patients?”, she asks.
Although not yet over, the opportunity to reflect on these early pandemic months is at once cathartic and deeply humbling. Powerful personal stories allow us to grieve the loss we have suffered as a nation, far beyond the statistics, as well as to appreciate the sacrifices made by NHS workers and volunteers who put helping others above all else. Although Clarke cannot conceal her blistering anger at the failings of those in charge, at its core Breathtaking brims with pride and positivity. “Every single day, the grit and devotion of colleagues astounded me”, she writes. “In the 11 years I have practised as a doctor, I have never been prouder of nor more humbled by the NHS and its people.”
Modern humans might share little in common with the Stone Age hunter gatherers who, 78,000 years ago, curled a dead child into the fetal position and buried it in a shallow grave in a Kenyan cave. But the humanity of their grief, and the care they demonstrated for the child, can still be felt by looking at those tiny human remains, arrayed as if still sleeping. Scientists don’t know whether the child’s family or community connected its burial with thoughts of the afterlife. In a way, though, their actions guaranteed the child would have another life. Unimaginably far into their future, the child is not forgotten and it offers a fascinating glimpse into how some past humans coped with death.
The 2-and-a-half to 3-year-old toddler now dubbed Mtoto (‘child’ in Swahili) was found in a specially dug grave now recognized as the oldest known human burial in Africa. The team that discovered and analyzed the child published their findings in this week’s issue of Nature. Extensive forensic and microscopic analysis of the remains and grave suggest that the child was buried soon after death, likely wrapped tightly in a shroud, laid in a fetal position and even provided with some type of pillow. The care humans took in burying this child suggests that they attached some deeper meaning to the event beyond the need to dispose of a lifeless body.
“When we start seeing behaviors where there is real interest in the dead, and they exceed the time and investment of resources needed for practical reasons, that’s when we start to see the symbolic mind,” says María Martinón-Torres, a co-author of the study and director of the National Research Centre on Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Burgos, Spain. “That’s what makes this so special. We’re looking [at] a behavior that we consider ourselves so typical of humans—and unique—which is establishing a relationship with the dead.”
Panga ya Saidi cave, in the tropical uplands along the Kenyan coast, is a key site for delving into the lives of ancient humans. In 2013, excavations there revealed the side edge of a small pit, and researchers used a tube to retrieve a sediment sample for dating. The sample immediately revealed the presence of some degraded and unidentified bones. It wasn’t until four years later that scientists began to suspect they’d found more than a few random remains. They dug about ten feet below the cave floor and found a circular, shallow pit tightly filled with an array of bones. But this surprise was shortly followed by another—the bones were in such a state of decomposition that any attempts to touch or move them turned them to dust.
So the team extracted the entire pit, protected it with a plaster encasement and moved it to the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi, and later to a specialized laboratory at CENIEH.
In the lab, scientists unleashed a toolbox of techniques and technologies to peer inside and analyze the bones and soils of the sediment block. Carefully excavating a bit of the block revealed two teeth whose familiar shape provided the first clue that the remains might represent a hominin burial. As the scientists delved further into the block they encountered more surprises. They found much of the well-preserved skull and face of the child, including some unerupted teeth still found within the mandible. These remains helped to ascertain that the team was exploring the remains of a very young member of our own species—Homo sapiens.
The group employed microtomography, a high-resolution X-ray based technique to determine that more bones were inside the block. But the bones were fragile and powdery; their low density made them very difficult to distinguish in images from the surrounding sediments. To solve this challenge, those cross-section scans were paired with software that sharpened them and eventually reconstructed 3-D images of the bones in the block. The image of a child, seemingly at rest, began to emerge.
Mtoto’s bones were articulated in nearly the same positions they would have been in life, anatomically connected at some points, with only small settling movements corresponding to those commonly seen as a body decomposes and flesh and muscle disappear. While the right ribs, on which the child was lying, are flattened, the spine and even rib cage curvature remain amazingly intact. This and other aspects of the skeleton’s condition provide a compelling line of evidence that the child had been buried soon after death, rapidly covered by soil and left to decompose peacefully in the grave. It stood in stark contrast to various animal bones of the same age found nearby—they had been broken, battered and scattered as a result of being left in the open.
The pit’s mix of sediment also differed in color and texture from surrounding sediments, revealing that it was dug and later filled in. And the dirt yielded still more clues. Geochemcial analysis of the soil showed elevated levels of calcium oxide and manganese oxide, chemical signals consistent with those expected to be produced by the purification of a body.
The child was lying on its right side, with knees drawn to its chest. The right clavicle (part of the shoulder) and the first and second ribs were rotated about 90 degrees, a state consistent with the upper body being wrapped or shrouded. The child may have been prepared and tightly wrapped with a shroud of large leaves or animal skins—an act that would make little sense for a body regarded as simply a lifeless corpse.
Finally, the position of the head suggests a tender touch. The first three cervical vertebrae, still attached to the base of the skull, were collapsed and rotated to a degree that suggests that the child was laid to rest with a pillow of biodegradable material under its head. When this pillow later decomposed, it appears that the head and vertebrae tilted accordingly.
An artist’s interpretation of Mtoto’s burial
Durham University archaeologist Paul Pettitt, an expert in Paleolithic funerary practices not involved with the research, called the study an exemplary exercise in modern forensic excavation and analysis. The totality of evidence seems to show that some person or persons cared for the child even after death. But what thoughts the ancient humans had about the dead is an intriguing question that may never be answered.
“The point at which behaviors towards the dead becomes symbolic is when those actions convey a meaning to a wider audience, that would be recognized by other members of the community and may reflect a shared set of beliefs,” says Louise Humphrey, an archaeologist at the Centre for Human Evolution Research at the Natural History Museum, London. “It’s not clear whether that’s the case here, of course, because we don’t know who attended the burial, whether it was the action of a single grief-stricken parent or an event for the larger community,” adds Humphrey, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Mtoto’s community was becoming increasingly more sophisticated. Surrounding soils in the cave from the same age as the grave are replete with an array of stone tools. The array of implements found suggests that Homo sapiens may have performed this burial during an era when they were gradually developing and using more advanced tool technologies.
Interestingly, the child wasn’t buried in some out of the way locale. It was buried at home. Panga ya Saidi cave is a key site inhabited by humans for some 78,000 years, until as recently as 500 years ago, and it also houses other, much younger burials. It remains a place of reverence for local humans to the present day, archaeologist Emmanuel K Ndiema of the National Museums in Kenya told reporters in a press conference unveiling the find.
The body was also found in a part of the cave that was frequently occupied by living humans. Martinón-Torres says this suggests a kind of relation between the dead and living, rather than the practical act of simply disposing of a corpse.
The bones were securely dated to 78,000 years ago. Though the date places Mtoto as the oldest human burial known in Africa, the child is not the oldest burial in the archaeological record. Burials of Homo sapiens at Qafzeh Cave, Israel, some 100,000 years ago, included pieces of red ocher, which was used to stain tools and may have been employed in some type of burial ritual. Iraq’s famed Shanidar Cave, which saw burials by Neanderthals, suggests another way in which Homo sapiens and Neanderthals may have been more similar than scientists once believed.
But evidence for funerary practices among Paleolithic humans and Neanderthals alike remains thin on the ground. That’s especially true in Africa, where it may be that scientists simply haven’t looked enough, as much of the continent has yet to be investigated. Climate works against African preservation as well, and different humans in different regions may have practiced different types of mortuary rituals as indeed they still do today.
Pettitt notes that the majority of humans who lived in Pleistocene—from 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago—Africa or Eurasia are archaeologically invisible. “They could have been tucked away in vegetation, floated off down rivers, placed on hills and high places…or simply left behind when the group moved on,” he notes.
If burial wasn’t standard Pleistocene practice, it begs the question why humans sometimes went to greater lengths to inter contemporaries like Mtoto. Pettitt leans towards the idea that such deaths were outside the norm.
The death of a child may have tended to spur humans to undergo the rigors and ritual of burial. A high ratio of child graves exist among the few Pleistocene sites that survive, including both of the earliest African burials, Panga ya Saidi and South Africa’s Border Cave, and many sites of Europe and Asia. Pettitt adds that among some hunter-gatherer societies the death of infants or children is viewed as unnatural and disturbingly out of the norm. “I wonder if these reflect the distinct treatment of dead infants that reflects societies emerging horror at such abnormalities?”
If Mtoto’s death caused exceptional grief, the child’s careful burial and the grave’s unlikely survival to the present day somehow create an equally exceptional connection between modern and ancient humans. In the physical world, ancient humans had to confront death too, and might such burials suggest that they also had symbolic thought about those that died?
“Somehow these types of funerary rites and burials are a way humans have to still connect with the dead,” says María Martinón-Torres. “Although they have died, they are still someone for the living.”
Eulogy, newspaper article, novel, poem… the obituary epitomises communal mourning, another aspect of being human that has been wrenched from society by Covid-19 restrictions.
At the heart of every culture’s funerary ceremonies lie rites meant to guide ritual accounting of the meaning, in death, of the deceased. The obituary and its cousin, the eulogy, is a literary document clearly conceived to be read out loud. It is often the central aspect of rituals of reckoning for gathering communities of bereaved audiences. The performance that is the reading of an obituary sets the tone for how shared memories of the dead unfold.
The onslaught wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic has occasioned death on a historic scale for humanity. Beyond the massive corporeal loss of life, the coronavirus is marking myriad cultural losses for mankind. This season of industrious dying is ironically denied much of the ritual usually associated with death. The funeral, central in every culture as a ceremony for communal mourning, and perhaps the commencement of a shared acceptance of healing, has been cancelled or at best curtailed by policies meant to curb the virus’ outbreak.
As a result, many families lose out on the chance to gather and remember their loved and departed members, barred as they are from sharing the crucial ritual of reminiscences.
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The obituary is a form of portrait, the reading of it performance art denied its customary audience by Covid-19 funeral restrictions. Those with means have found a way to connect with physically distanced mourners over social media platforms. The result is a new content regime in which private quarrels generated by grief become larger public spectacles as a result of streaming. In an earlier time, these would have been the preserve of gathered friends and family, at worst gossip fodder for the immediate community.
At the height of the initial strict lockdown, social media gave us an example of this kind of contentious occasion. The Rakgadi meme exploded on to our smartphones after Semati Moedi contradicted decorum at the memorial service for her brother, the tombstone king Lebohang Khitsane. Driven by grief, Rakgadi, the eldest aunt of the family, attacked his widow with accusations of infidelity. The farce and fervour that followed pried open age-old debates about decorum, trauma and the limits of righteous indignation. Close behind were questions about why obituaries always read like sanitised versions of the dead, deviant in life now made darlings after death.
The obituary as newspaper feature
Beyond the funeral gatherings that make theatre of tributes, the obituary exists as a cherished newspaper feature. In this mode, it becomes a potentially polemical memorial. A public letter occasioned by the death of a notable figure to contest crucial social issues.
When larger-than-life American star Little Richard died in May last year, the world went into overdrive with debates about the Black roots of rock and roll, its appropriation by white America and the neglect of the real progenitors of the multibillion-dollar art form, Richard among them. Centrepieces of the debate were defined by the proliferation of newspaper obituaries published globally in the wake of his death.
In Mzansi, Bongani Madondo led the charge against culture vultures. “Richard died last Saturday at the age of 87 and the world lost its marbles. Lord ha’ mercy, what we gonna do? For one, we can all claim we loved him madly. That he was our darling queer avatar,” wrote Madondo, taking issue with the public’s propensity to posture fake care for the dead who suffer neglect in life. At once, the obituary campaigned against pop culture’s social hypocrisies, and dared to settle historic racial scores for the credit of Black creative genius.
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Following the death in 1964 of Sophiatown’s beer-beaten golden boy of letters, Can Temba, his friend and fellow writer Lewis Nkosi sat down to write his obituary. The article was headlined “The will to die” after one of Temba’s short stories. It opens with an epigraph composed of a statement Temba made at an unnamed friend’s funeral: “This son of bitch had no business to die… [sic].” What followed is a study of the horrible state of life in apartheid South Africa. Nkosi highlights the devastation borne by the suicides of creative people such as Nat Nakasa and Ingrid Jonker to understand the death of his friend Temba.
In less lofty instances, the newspaper obituary has been seen as an inconsequential space filler. This point was made by former Sunday Times newspaper editor Ken Owen in a brutal albeit memorable put-down of journalist Chris Barron. The pair were part of a larger media brawl with biographer Ronald Suresh Roberts.
Responding to what was then Barron’s latest op-ed attack against Roberts, Owen took his famous shot: “In his eagerness to smear Ronald Roberts, Barron has misquoted me … He should stick to writing obituaries – the subjects will not complain.”
In this way, Owen shored up the form’s propensity to be inconsequential content. To be balanced, though, Barron’s LinkedIn profile professes that “he turned what was a moribund and largely ignored obituaries section into one of the most eagerly read pages in the newspaper”.
A form and genre
There have been grand moments of glory for the form. The New York Times celebrated the newspaper obit as a genre in 2016 by sharing highlights from its archive. The editors noted proudly that since 1851, more than 200 000 people had been the subjects of obituaries in the paper.
Arguably the most notable was a piece announcing the death of Christopher McCandless. The account of McCandless’ fate stands as a monument to the power of the newspaper obit. McCandless died in the Alaskan wilderness during an ill-fated journey to sever ties with all he had known.
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The first paragraph cloaked him in mystery and tragedy, turning him into a folkloric figure: “No one is yet certain who he was. But his diary and two notes found at the camp tell a wrenching story of his desperate and progressively futile efforts to survive.” It was a short newspaper obituary. But it unleashed an industrious mining for meaning into the life and death of McCandless that would yield further feature articles internationally, at least two bestselling books and a Hollywood biopic called Into the Wild. The film starred Emile Hirsch and Kristen Stewart, with Sean Penn as the director. It was nominated for best editing and best supporting actor awards at the Oscars.
It is doubtful McCandless would have gained this posthumous fame and glory were it not for that compelling newspaper obituary. It launched him as a symbol of youthful renunciation of modernity in search of a lost, liberated, prehistoric purity of man.
The obituary in literature
American novelist Ann Hood published an aptly titled piece of historical fiction, The Obituary Writer, in 2013. Its plot zeroes in on the cathartic benefits of writing obituaries. In part, the book tells the story of Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, who by telling the stories of the dead not only helps others cope with their grief but also begins to understand the ravages of her own losses.
The Obituary Writer shores up Hood as a discerning novelist who manages to magnify the underlying feature of the obit as a cultural artefact. It converges the needs of the individual with the requirements of community for mutual healing during times of death.
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There are few poets who’ve had to contend with the meaning of death and personal loss like Ted Hughes. His first wife and fellow poet Sylvia Plath killed herself after Hughes left her for another woman, Assia Wevill, who also killed herself along with their four-year-old daughter Shura. The tragedy of Plath’s death, for which Hughes was blamed, would become the subject of one of his most memorable poems. This in part because of the legend that surrounds its discovery more than a decade after he died.
Titled Last Letter, the poem is an account of the night Plath died. The various versions of the previously unknown poem were published in the New Statesman magazine, in part to report and register the historically unacknowledged torment Hughes lived with following the death of Plath and also to bear witness to his repeated attempts to perfect his poetic account of the night she died.
In the poem, which was read live on BBC Channel 4 News by actor Jonathan Pryce, Hughes recalls the night of Plath’s suicide, even the phone call that delivered the dark news:
What happened that Sunday night? Your last night? Over what I remember of it… Then a voice like a selected weapon or a carefully measured injection coolly delivered its four words deep into my ear your wife is dead.
In this way, the writing of the poem as a private obituary, along with the promise of a probable audience in some future, allowed Hughes to live productively with grief in a way that writing about dead loved ones makes possible.
It is the singular power of the obituary, the making into artful verse the painful episodes in our personal universes. We write obituaries, read them out loud to gathered friends, to make certain that we are not alone in our hour of need. The legislated dearth of community in dealing with death during the Covid-19 pandemic denies us this connection. The omission of audiences for obituaries is central to the larger loss of our time.
Death can be a difficult topic to discuss, and despite its inevitability we can be left feeling surprised or unprepared when confronted with it. A new book, How to Die Well, aims to change this by looking at the four stages of death, from ‘Before you Go’ and ‘Your Funeral’, to ‘Saying Goodbye’ and ‘Good Grief’.
The book, produced by life insurance company Royal London and creative agency Rankin, explores these processes through illustrations by Italian-born, Denmark-based artist, Andrea Ucini. Ucini’s understated style makes a poignant foil for the complexity of the subject matter, with his neat images drawing everyday scenes in simple linework. The muted colour palette and pure form gently subvert the mundane, with the prosaic nature of his portraits lending acceptance to death’s role in life.
Saying Goodbye – Pets and Death
Muslim Final Goodbye
In Saying Goodbye, a couple are divided by a fractured bridge. In Pets and Death, a dog rests behind his owner’s unworn coat and boots which dress an invisible profile. In Before You Go, a couple pause a bike ride to hold each other. Your Funeral depicts a solitary pianist returning to the stage for his final bow, Good Grief a woman embracing emptiness.
The illustrations are a complement to the book which, alongside practical advice from settling estates to writing a will and saying the final goodbyes, offers personal essays; including from photographer Rankin who reflects on his parents’ death. It looks into often stressful issues including palliative care, funeral poverty and assisted dying in a bid to open the conversation around death. §
Good GriefBefore You GoSaying GoodbyeBefore You GoBefore You Go – Writing a Will
Artist Support Pledge one year on: is it here to stay?
There has been one year of #artistsupportpledge, the Instagram initiative that brought income to artists in times of turbulence, and art to collectors at accessible prices. We caught up with founder, artist Matthew Burrows to find out how ASP turned from short term solution to global movement.
One year ago, art galleries had shuttered their doors, revenue streams for artists were evaporating, and the art world began a sustained physical hiatus. Amid this tsunami of uncertainty, a hashtag began taking Instagram by storm.
The Artist Support Pledge (#artistsupportpledge) presented an opportunity for artists to sell their work directly via the social media platform. Though simple, this artist-to-patron, artist-to-artist formula, proved revolutionary. To recap, each time an artist makes £1,000 in sales, they commit 20 per cent of their earnings to purchasing another artist’s work. The rules are not enforced; this is a principle built on trust and generosity, and one year on, the initiative has cast a positive light on the human condition. ‘ASP has proven that the vast majority are only too willing to give generosity a go,’ says Matthew Burrows, Sussex-based artist and founder of Artist Support Pledge. ‘It has fundamentally changed my view on what is possible.’
Portrait of Artist Support Pledge founder, Matthew Burrows. Photography: Jonathan Bassett
Artist Support Pledge, now a non-profit company, was conceived as an open, democratic marketplace based on a sustainable ‘micro-culture and economy’, as opposed to one of aggressive growth. Initially, it was to tide artists over until a three month isolation period lapsed, but as we now know things escalated. ‘Artist Support Pledge was set up as an emergency response to a desperate situation and has evolved into a new cultural economy formed out of a simple idea, who could have imagined that?’ Burrows explains.
‘Sharing economies are at the forefront of economic thinking so it’s prescient that ASP’s impact has caught on. Fundamentally ASP is a movement which operates through cultural values, for the good of the many and not merely the few.’ This is not exactly a new concept; human beings thrived in societies based on similar principles for hundreds of thousands of years pre-industrialisation. As Burrows adds, ‘using digital media to create community-focused economies is the only new part.’
In another major recent development, the initiative has welcomed a-n (The Artists Information Company), the UK’s largest artists’ membership organisation, on board as a supporting partner. ‘It’s a natural match, we are both committed to nurturing and supporting the lives of artists,’ Burrows explains. ‘a-n have been doing it for years and are well set up to support ASP’s ambitions.
It’s also been a year Burrows is unlikely to forget personally; he was made an MBE in The Queen’s birthday honours list, was named Apollo’s Personality of the Year, and was listed among the ArtReview Power 100. ‘I get messages, letters and gifts almost every day from artists, from all over the world, expressing their gratitude. It can be overwhelming’ he says. ‘Some are just happy they have sold a few pieces, others are making a very good living paying rent and feeding their families. Then there are the buyers, who for the first time, feel like they have the opportunity to purchase art, without having to be super-rich.’
One year on, galleries and art spaces around the world are gradually showing signs of emerging from hibernation, but ASP is proving to be far from redundant. ‘There are just too many people living off ASP right now for it to stop.’ says Burrows, who will continue supporting artists in an ever-shifting landscape. He aims to ‘build bridges’ with commercial and public galleries, as well as educational institutions, but for that, he’ll require staff, and ergo funding.
So where will Artist’s Support Pledge be one year from now? Burrows’ goals are characteristically ambitious, but if the initiative’s track record is anything to go by, not unattainable. ‘I hope that ASP will have a team maintaining and developing a vibrant cultural initiative and economy, borne out of crisis into a new order of cooperation and interdependence.’ §
By the time I came to know Michelle Zauner as a writer, when The New Yorker published her personal essay “Crying in H Mart” in August 2018, I had been following her as a musician for five years.
I first saw her perform in Philadelphia as the frontwoman of emo band Little Big League in 2013; when she emerged with her poppy shoegaze solo project Japanese Breakfast in 2016, I recognized Zauner only in her soaring, searching voice.
Psychopomp, the first record Zauner released as Japanese Breakfast, hinted at where she had been in between: escorting her mother from the world of the living to that of the dead. The first track “In Heaven” tells some of the story of the aftermath of her mother’s death of cancer in 2014: “The dog’s confused / She just paces around all day / sniffing at your empty room / I’m trying to believe / When I sleep it’s really you / Visiting my dreams / like they say that angels do.” Those lyrics break me a little each time I hear them, reminding me of my own grief, of my own sweet childhood dog who looked for my mother and father after they both died of cancer when I was a teenager.
But where Psychopomp and her 2017 record Soft Sounds from Another Planet explore death and grief in sparse lyrics over upbeat synths, in “Crying in H Mart” Zauner digs much deeper. The essay meditates on how shopping at the Korean American supermarket H Mart brought her mother back to her but still made her loss sting. At H Mart, Zauner writes, “you’ll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mom’s soy-sauce eggs.”
“Crying in H Mart,” stood out to me as a representation of grief that I could relate to — one that doesn’t reach for silver linings, but illuminates the unending nature of loss: “Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding into a wall that won’t give…a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.”
That essay became the first chapter of Zauner’s new memoir, also titled Crying in H Mart, which powerfully maps a complicated mother-daughter relationship cut much too short. Stories of Korean food serve as the backbone of the book, as Zauner plumbs the connections between food and identity. That search takes on new urgency after her mother’s death — in losing her mother, she also lost her strongest tether to Korean culture.
Zauner was born in Seoul, the daughter of Chongmi, a native of the city, and Joel, a white American. When she was a year old, the family relocated to Eugene, Oregon, where her mother ruled with an exacting nature. Chongmi was a woman in pursuit of perfection in everything, and of course this prodding extended to her only child. At a young age, Zauner realized that one way she could get her mother’s approval was demonstrating an adventurous appetite. On trips to Seoul, they bonded over midnight snacks on jet-lagged nights, when they “ate ganjang gejang…sucking salty, rich, custardy raw crab from its shell.”
Zauner’s food descriptions transport us to the table alongside her. On a college break, when her mother prepares galbi ssam, the relief of being cared for with a meal attuned to one’s tastes radiates off the page: “Blissfully I laid my palm flat, blanketed it with a piece of lettuce, and dressed it just the way I liked — a piece of glistening short rib, a spoonful of warm rice, a dredge of ssamjang, and a thin slice of raw garlic…I closed my eyes and savored the first few chews, my taste buds and stomach having been deprived of a home-cooked meal.”
It is this kind of care that Zauner attempts to repay for her mother when she is diagnosed with stage IV squamous-cell carcinoma in her stomach at age 56. After her mother’s diagnosis in May 2014, Zauner, then 25, moves home, ready to bolster Chongmi through chemotherapy with Korean cooking.
But chemo wrecks the appetite — I recall my mother being plagued with everything tasting as though it were laced with metal. During the first round of chemo, her mother can’t keep food down; during the second round, she develops mouth sores that make eating painful. When the chemo fails to shrink her tumor, Chongmi decides to forgo further treatment, having learned a lesson from her younger sister Eunmi, who died of colon cancer following 24 chemo treatments. In this, Crying in H Mart is a rare acknowledgement of the ravages of cancer in a culture obsessed with seeing it as an enemy that can be battled with hope and strength.
Zauner carries the same clear-eyed frankness to writing about her mother’s death five months after her diagnosis. One chapter recounts her mother’s last days, unconscious at home, her breathing “a horrible sucking like the last sputtering of a coffeepot.” It is rare to read about a slow death in such detail, an odd gift in that it forces us to sit with mortality rather than turn away from it.
Also notable is that Chongmi’s death does not fall at the end of the book. It comes just past halfway through, allowing Zauner ample space to grapple with the immensity of her loss. One balm that emerges is reconnecting with her Korean identity through finally learning to cook the dishes she longed to make for her mother.
As a teen, Zauner drifted away from her Koreanness, effacing that side of her heritage for fear of being seen as other. In those same years, she shrunk from her mother’s need for control and constant wheedling. Just as they established their adult relationship — just as Zauner begun to embrace her mother’s culture — her mother died: “What would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.”
Cooking becomes the key. Her teacher is Maangchi, described by The New York Times as “YouTube’s Korean Julia Child.” In cooking, Zauner conjures ghosts: her aunt Eunmi munching on Korean fried chicken, her mother ordering more kimchi to go with knife-cut noodle soup in Seoul, her grandmother slurping black-bean noodles.
Near the end of the book, Zauner meditates on the process of fermenting kimchi, and how it allows cabbage to “enjoy a new life altogether.” She realizes that she needs to tend to her memories and heritage in the same way: “The culture that we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me…If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”
What Crying in H Mart reveals, though, is that in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself.
The special project “What Loss Looks Like” presents personal artifacts belonging to those who have left us and explores what they mean to those left behind.
Readers submitted photos of items that reminded them of loved ones who died in the past year.
By Jaspal Riyait
As the art director of the Well desk, I’ve spent the last year looking for images to reflect the devastation of the pandemic and the grief it has wrought. As the crisis has stretched on, I’ve thought of all the people who have lost loved ones to Covid-19 — not to mention those who have lost loved ones, period — and how they were cut off from the usual ways of gathering and grieving. Watching the numbers rise every day, it was easy to lose sight of the people behind the statistics. I wanted to find a way to humanize the death toll and re-establish the visibility of those who had died.
To help our readers honor the lives of those lost during the pandemic, we decided to ask them to submit photographs of objects that remind them of their loved ones. The responses were overwhelming, capturing love, heartache and remembrance. We heard from children, spouses, siblings, grandchildren and friends — people who had lost loved ones not only to Covid-19 but from all manner of causes. What united them was their inability to mourn together, in person.
Dani Blum, Well’s senior news assistant, spent hours speaking with each individual by phone. “It’s the hardest reporting I’ve ever done, but I feel really honored to be able to tell these stories,” she said. “What struck me the most about listening to all of these stories was how much joy there was in remembering the people who died, even amid so much tragedy. Many of these conversations would start in tears and end with people laughing as they told me a joke the person they lost would tell, or their favorite happy memory with them.”
The photographs and personal stories, published digitally as an interactive feature, was designed by Umi Syam and titled “What Loss Looks Like.” Among the stories we uncovered: A ceremonial wedding lasso acts as a symbol of the unbreakable bond between a mother and father, both lost to Covid-19 and mourned by their children. A ceramic zebra figurine reminds one woman of her best friend, who died after they said a final goodbye. A gold bracelet that belonged to a father never leaves his daughter’s wrist because she is desperate for any connection to his memory.
For those who are left behind, these items are tangible daily reminders of those who have departed. These possessions hold a space and tell a story. Spend time with them and you begin to feel the weight of their importance, the impact and memory of what they represent.
Museums have long showcased artifacts as a connection to the past. So has The New York Times, which published a photo essay in 2015 of objects collected from the World Trade Center and surrounding area on 9/11. As we launched this project, we heard from several artists who, in their own work, explored the connection between objects and loss.
Shortly after Hurricane Sandy, Elisabeth Smolarz, an artist in Queens, began working on “The Encyclopedia of Things,” which examines loss and trauma through personal objects. Kija Lucas, a San Francisco-based artist, has been photographing artifacts for the past seven years, displaying her work in her project “The Museum of Sentimental Taxonomy.”
“Saved: Objects of the Dead” is a 12-year project by the artist Jody Servon and the poet Lorene Delany-Ullman, in which photographs of personal objects from deceased loved ones are paired with prose to explore the human experience of life, death and memory. And the authors Bill Shapiro and Naomi Wax spent years interviewing hundreds of people and asking them about the most meaningful single object in their lives, gathering their stories in the book “What We Keep.”
As the pandemic continues to grip the nation, the Well desk will continue to wrestle with the large-scale grief that it leaves in its wake. Other features on this topic include resources for those who are grieving, the grief that’s associated with smaller losses, and how grief affects physical and psychological health. As for “What Loss Looks Like,” we are keeping the callout open, inviting more readers to submit objects of importance, to expand and grow this virtual memorial and provide a communal grieving space.
“I’ve . . . learned that pain is number 6 on the list of reasons why people want medical aid in dying,” former NPR talk show host Diane Rehm says. “The loss of joy in life is number one.”
By Katherine Ellison
John Rehm’s death changed Diane Rehm’s life.
Ten years after John was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he couldn’t stand, walk, eat or go to the toilet by himself. Outraged because the law forbade his doctor to help hasten his death, he resolved to stop eating and drinking.
Diane, the celebrated NPR talk show host and John’s wife of 54 years, kept vigil for the next 10 days. Just after 2 a.m. on June 23, 2014 — a few hours before John died — she took out her iPad and typed the first sentences of a passionate argument for medical aid in dying.
“In most of America, lawmakers and the church are deciding this issue for other people,” she says. “People they’ve never met. People whose suffering they have no way of understanding.”
In 2016, Diane retired from NPR station WAMU after working there for more than 30 years. Since then, she has championed what she and other advocates call “death with dignity.” On Wednesday, PBS will broadcast her new documentary, “When My Time Comes.”
The one-hour program and a similarly titled book published last year describe the death of her husband, a former lawyer for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and the perspectives of politicians, doctors and patients about the movement that has led to new laws in nine states and the District.
Diane remarried in 2017, at age 81, to retired Lutheran minister and therapist John Hagedorn. Since leaving WAMU, she has been producing a twice-weekly podcast and a monthly book club. She spoke to The Washington Post in an hour-long telephone conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Why did your husband want to die?
A: It wasn’t so much that he was in pain. He said he had lost his sense of dignity. He was a very proud man, and he felt that if he continued to live he was going to lose even more dignity. He still had his sharp mind, and he knew exactly what he was doing and saying. Our daughter said, “Dad, we can keep you comfortable,” and he said, “Dammit, I don’t want comfort.”
I’ve since learned that pain is number 6 on the list of reasons why people want medical aid in dying. The loss of joy in life is number one. The morning after John had that conversation with his doctor, I remember walking in to see him and saying: “Sweetheart, you look wonderful! Your face is rosy and your eyes are sparkling!” He said: “I have begun the journey.”
Q: Do you worry that these laws allowing doctors to prescribe medications for the terminally ill so they can die peacefully could be a slippery slope toward making suicide more acceptable?
A: There’s a huge difference between medical aid in dying and assisted suicide. People who commit suicide want to die. In the film, I speak with a 37-year-old mother of two with breast cancer that had spread throughout her body. She said “If I had my druthers, I’d live until I’m 90. But I know I can’t, and I don’t want my 13-year-old son to see me suffer.” That’s the difference between medical aid in dying and suicide. One is a choice. The other is there is no choice; she knows she’s going to die and she wants to die peacefully and in a way that doesn’t leave her children with memories of her in agony.
Q: What limits, if any, protect people who might be pressured to end their lives early?
A: These laws are very specific, modeled on the first one, passed in Oregon in 1997. You must be within six months of death. You must be able to self-administer medication. You therefore cannot wait until your swallowing mechanism no longer operates and you also cannot wait until you can no longer say that you’re ready. In some states, you must be interviewed by a psychiatrist, alone, so that it’s clear that no one else is making this decision.
Q: What surprised you the most as you did your research?
A: What really shocks me is the fact that the Roman Catholic Church has been the most well-funded and outspoken opponent of medical aid in dying. A referendum in Massachusetts found some 70 percent of those polled said they were in favor. But then the church put $5 million into defeating that proposal.
Now, if your faith says to you, “I want God to decide when my life is going to end,” I’m in support of that. I’m an active Episcopalian myself.
If that’s what you want for yourself, I’m happy to support you along the way, and if you want everything medical aid can offer, then of course that’s what you should have. But I also believe that for people who’ve reached the end of a long, hard illness and are in their final six months before death, well, they should have a choice.
Q: What else do you think is preventing these laws from passing in more states?
A: Denial is a big problem. Talking about death is so taboo. You see me in the film standing in the church, asking how many people in the congregation plan not to die? Everybody is uncomfortable with the idea of death, so they don’t want to talk about it. But then what happens when your mother or father is dying and you haven’t spoken to them in advance? How are you to know what they want? Do they want to be hooked up to every possible machine at the end?
People also don’t know how and where the laws are changing. We now have medical aid in dying in Washington, D.C., but so many people do not know it. And 10 states are currently debating it, including New York and Connecticut. I am very hopeful this film will get more people talking about it. I also think covid has gotten people thinking more about how close death is for all of us.
As soon as the virus hit, I called my own physician and said I do not wish to go to a hospital if I come down with covid. I will not be put on a ventilator. She said “If that is your wish, I will make a note of it.” I switched doctors once we began making this film and I realized how few doctors are willing to help people who are ready to make up their minds.
Q: How did your bosses at NPR react to your outspokenness on such a controversial issue?
A: In 2016, there was a story about my advocacy in The Washington Post. I was planning then to do several dinners for Compassion & Choices, [ a U.S. nonprofit group working to improve patients’ rights]. NPR called and took me to task. Then 10 of the top executives at NPR came to WAMU and we sat in the conference room with my manager, and he was so worried I was going to stand up and say I quit if they told me I couldn’t do those dinners. I told them I was sorry but I wasn’t backing down. I wasn’t being paid to speak, but it was very important to me. Eventually they compromised and said do the three dinners you committed to do but if you speak out on this again on the air you will have to say you’re an advocate for medical aid in dying.
Q: Was this tension a factor in your decision to retire?
A: Absolutely not. Not at all. I was going to be 80 and I honestly feel that when those of us who’ve had such long and wonderful careers reach a certain point it’s no longer fair to just keep going because we have a big audience and people want us to keep going. There are young, talented people who ought to have a right to move into those chairs.
Q: Your documentary shows you with a young man videotaping you expressing your wishes for how you want to die. What are you telling him?
A: That’s my grandson Benjamin. He was 19 at the time. I’m telling him that should I somehow become an individual who experiences Alzheimer’s, I need you to tell me early on that you are seeing this. If that does happen, I will begin making my plans to end my life before I am no longer able to do so. Obviously, this is not allowed under any current Medical Aid in Dying laws around the country, so I will have to plan to take matters into my own hands.
When my time comes, I want all of my family with me: my husband, son, his wife, my daughter, her husband, their children and my dearest friends. I want us all to be sipping champagne and telling good stories about the times we’ve shared. And when the moment arrives, I want to go into my own bedroom with my children and my husband and I want to be able to go peacefully with the medications.
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