Love in the Archives: A Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss by Eileen Vorbach Collins EILEEN VORBACH COLLINS'S new memoir-in-essays, Love in the Archives: A Patchwork of Stories About Suicide Loss , is about the liminal space of parental grief and the big questions that inevitably follow: What happened to that which animated my beloved's physical form? What is real? How can I go on? Collins lost her 15-year-old daughter, Lydia, to suicide and is condemned to obsession over the “burden of perspicacity” borne by the teenaged girl. “I'll never know what it was like for my daughter,” she writes. “I suspect she was bombarded by her senses. Too much input and no way to turn down the volume.” Ambiguous loss —a term coined by Dr. Pauline Boss—is used to describe an “unclear” death. Perhaps a cause of death cannot be determined, a body cannot be recovered, or a motive for suicide is unknown. Modern storytelling around loss and grief demands resolution, but this is not always possible. How does one tell a story without an end? Collins discusses this problem in the preface: Although we may always look for the why, we will never find it. The only why I am sure of is why I write this pain. I write because it's mine to tell, and what else am I to do with it? I live it and know many others are living it too. […] I have no advice for bereaved parents. No platitudes. No assurances of a heavenly reunion. I have only stories. Like my grief, like my life, there is no narrative arc. There is conflict and movement but no resolution. So, I wrote this book in pieces. Love in the Archives doesn't only detail life before and after Lydia's death. It also explores how Judaism, the natural world, and divorce affected Collins's ability to “move forward” in a world that looked the same but would never again exist for her. Collins's sardonic wit cuts through her painful memories, releasing shame, stigma, and other contributors to prolonged grief in the process. The reader […]
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