Memorializing Grief and Trauma by Stephanie Arel

On Monday, March 18^th, I joined a webinar developed by Dr. John Seitz and Sonia de Silva Monteiro at Fordham University. The panel included myself, Dr. Layla Karst, Assistant Professor of Theological Studies from Loyola Marymount, and Dr. Alana Harris, Reader in Modern British Social, Cultural and Gender History at King’s College London. All offered valuable insights to the topic: “Memorializing Clergy Sexual Abuse: An Interdisciplinary Conversation about the Ethics, Means, and Meanings of Sex Abuse Memorials.” The panel represented one of a series you can follow here.

My presentation featured some things I learned from researching my last book Bearing Witness: The Wounds of Trauma at Memorial Museums. The text focuses on memorial museums, illuminating methods of memorializing human suffering, suffering that penetrates workers’ personal lives. In fact, people preserving painful memories and histories often labor (physically and emotionally) from a place of personal wounding. From nine sites across the globe, 82 interviews revealed that 35% of the people engaged in memorializing mass trauma in a museum setting are survivors of the event they commemorate; 35% are family members of those who suffered or died; and the remaining signify community members, who are not impacted directly by the event or events commemorated but care deeply about those who were.

Beyond the memorial museum field, I would argue that people committed to the care of the other or whose passion emerges from a desire to address, attend to, and heal (to whatever extent that is possible) intimate wounds have a connection to those wounds, personally or connected to the wounding of those persons/things they love.

For those in the memorial museum field, the assertation that the vocation they engage – to address mass trauma reconstructing new meaning and life in its aftermath – has personal significance is absolutely true. This fact creates some needs around how to tell and preserve a story that is inherently and predominantly traumatic. Memorializing trauma requires some explicit attention to the horror of the event(s) commemorated and becomes more successful (for the health and growth of all) when affiliated practices attune to recovery from trauma. Period.

Making conscious how processes that address trauma contribute to rehabilitation improves the results. Another way to say this is that the more people are cognitively aware of processes of change, recovery, and growth, the more each can be embodied, felt into, and lived. In the trajectory, what is known becomes felt and sensed. Religion, for instance, is particularly suited and, in fact, uniquely equipped to provide this orientation from cognition to embodiment: knowing that a particular ritual offers respite from pain, encourages fuller sensory participation and facilitates recovery. In a memorial museum setting, exhibits are prepared with intention: there are places to grieve; there are places set off because they are more disturbing than others. There are spaces left intentionally dark. What happens when attention is drawn more acutely to effects – meant to impact the sensory – but that also have a component of trauma recovery that can be made cognitive?

This question brings me back to the panel on the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church and practices of memorialization. Most scholarship shows that memorials and memorial museums do not heal past wounding. I argue that in order for there to be a space for attending to wounding and ameliorating it, for processes of recovery to occur, they must be made explicit. For instance, because of the nature of the harm and the intense silencing that occurred by the bystander (i.e. the Church as an institution), naming the problem (a cognitive act) is a first and critical step that would make up any commemorative process for the sexual abuse scandal. And that naming may have to happen again and again. Another example materializes in the need to create room or space for the intense grief that survivors must experience to move forward and integrate sexual, physical, and spiritual trauma.

Memorials that attend to such harm must also address the lack of accountability on the part of political, judicial, and financial arenas to confront and resist attitudes that promote the concept of “leaving the past alone.” Unresolved pasts haunt, and to begin to imagine a future of acknowledging sexual abuse is to confront an uncomfortable topic, name it, grieve it, and hold accountable the structures and systems that support it.