Sweet dreams: Biographical blanks and the commemoration of children

Abstract

In recent years, the commemoration of children and infants has assumed increasingly expressive and conspicuous forms at Danish cemeteries, setting their grave plots apart from the predominant design idiom, otherwise characterised by coherence and modesty, in the form of short biographies of the deceased or by presencing her or his personality. The question, then, is how we are to understand this boisterous mode of commemoration, when the deceased was stillborn or only lived for a few years? Exploring this paradox subsequently leads to the scrutiny of recent developments in public memorial culture as it unfolds on the internet. The article thus examines the intersections of memory and emotion, and it specifically explores the narrative forms for children in commemorative practice.

Keywords:

• infant death
• cemetery culture
• internet memorials
• emotion
• narrative

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for Howard Williams' invitation to contribute to this themed issue of Mortality, and I wish to express my gratitude for assisting me throughout the process of writing it. Also, I would like to thank Juliane Wammen for providing useful reflections on previous versions of the article. In addition, comments provided by Mortality's two anonymous reviewers also helped me in revising the text. The main parts of the article were composed when I was a PhD student at the University of Aarhus, and I am indebled to my employment at the University as well as to funding from the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. All errors and misunderstandings remain my own.

Notes

All photos are by the author. All quoted texts from gravestones and internet memorial sites have been translated from Danish to English by the author.

I note that the ethical validity of showing photographs of grave sites and disclosing links to the internet memorials was questioned by one of the article's reviewers. I have anonymised the images of gravestones and omitted place names and geographical references to the cemeteries under scrutiny at the request of the Editors and Editorial Board of Mortality. I have opted to include links to the internet sites for the sake of documentation. As stated in the article, the websites do often contain images of the dead children, and viewers should be prepared to be exposed to graphic details.

http://www.josefines-minde.dk/

http://lisasminde.dk/

http://www.bigboom.dk/8618282

http://www.metteogfrank.dk/mathiasogsimon/

http://www.spaedbarnsdoed.dk/