Outside the (memory) box: how unpredictable objects disrupt the discourse of bereavement in narratives of pregnancy loss

ABSTRACT

The memory boxes produced by UK charity and support agencies such as Sands are given to families who experience stillbirth and pregnancy loss. These memory boxes form part of a twenty-year-old practice of bereavement care. In this article, we focus on the aspects of memorialisation present in narratives of pregnancy loss that involve a variety of material objects that women selected and chose to keep either within or outside of a memory box. Drawing on a selection of interviews conducted as part of a larger-scale investigation, we explore how women who have experienced a stillbirth or termination for foetal anomaly ascribe meaning to the objects they select. While some ‘melancholy objects’ bring consolation, others operate as unpredictable objects whose meanings and stories cannot be contained in the memory box nor narrated within the conventional discourses of bereavement that accompany the boxes. Such objects cause productive forms of disruption that, on the one hand, unsettle the discourse of bereavement and, on the other hand, offer a form of expression for women’s agency. Conceptualising objects of mourning as unpredictable helps to puncture the mainstream idea (in western society) that bereavement is a journey towards healing.

KEYWORDS:

• Bereavement
• grief
• stillbirth
• pregnancy loss
• memorialisation
• memory boxes

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank everyone who participated in the qualitative research stages of ‘Death Before Birth,’ our project partners (ARC, MA, Sands) and our fellow team members Prof Jeannette Littlemore, Dr Sheelagh McGuinness, Dr Sarah Turner, and Meera Burgess. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the UK Data Service at https://beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datacatalogue/studies/study?id=853488 ReShare record 853488.

Notes

1. Notable exceptions include storylines in the soap operas EastEnders (2015) and Coronation Street (2017). Both productions generated news stories and prompted responses from the public via social media.

2. See Fuller et al. (2018) for details.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council, Grant ES-N008359.

Notes on contributors

Danielle Fuller

Danielle Fuller was originally trained as a Canadian literature specialist, but her interest in lived experience as a form of knowledge threads through research that takes up a range of methods in a variety of domains, from reading studies and book history to research creation and medical humanities. Publications include Writing the Everyday: Atlantic Women’s Textual Communities (2004), Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture (2013) with DeNel Rehberg Sedo, and, as co-editor, ‘Readers, Reading and Digital Media’, a special section of Participations (May 2019). Recently, she was PI for ‘Death Before Birth,’ an ESRC-funded project about pregnancy loss (www.deathbeforeproject.org) and for Babbling Beasts: Telling Stories, Building Digital Games. Exploring Creative Reading and Writing for Life funded by Arts Council England. Her current collaborative research projects investigate how readers engage with bestsellers, and the uses of memoir reading. She emigrated to Canada from the UK in May 2018 and is a Professor at the University of Alberta.

Karolina Kuberska

Karolina Kuberska is a medical anthropologist specialising in understandings of health and well-being. She is now a Research Associate at The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute (THIS Institute) at the University of Cambridge, UK, working on collaborative projects aiming to strengthen the evidence base for improving the quality and safety of healthcare. She is currently the lead researcher on ‘DA VINCI’ project that focuses on developing a visual identification method for people with cognitive impairment in institutional settings. Her doctoral research project looked at postnatal health of Andean migrant women in a lowland Bolivian city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, focusing on the frictions between traditional and biomedical notions in the context of broader socio-politico-economic trends affecting existing plural healthcare pathways. Between 2016 and 2018 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK, as part of a multidisciplinary research team on ‘Death Before Birth’ project that explored socio-legal intersections of decision-making processes in the experiences of miscarriage, termination, and stillbirth.