Artwork by Molly Costello, curated and made available by Lifted Voices and Love & Protect for their week of collective mourning of Covid-19 victims.
by Jane Field
This talk was originally presented by Jane Field on TAVP’s panel “Story Sharing for Cultural Transformation” for the New Story Journey: Connection, Courage, and Creativity on September 26, 2020.
As we were planning this presentation, our co-presenter Walter Long asked us to consider our relationships to place — this place, currently called Texas — where many of us physically are, and where this conference was originally to be held, in person. I came to Texas in 2011, with no plan or intention of staying. I am here today, nearly ten years later, because this is where I was living when my sister died. I was twenty five, and when she died — after being sick for years — I got stuck: emotionally, but also physically, unable to find momentum to move on from the life I was living when she died. The world — pop culture, friends, media — implied my grief would be easier to move through because in some ways, I’d already grieved during the long road to her death. Of course, our dominant culture knows next to nothing about the realities of grieving, and we do our best to tell ourselves these optimistic little myths and half-truths: that grief is over before it has begun, that when one story has ended, and another will soon begin. Boundaries are clear: one door closes, and another opens. Of course, this is not reflective of the actual nature of grief.
It’s not very surprising, then, that after some time in this period of being stuck, I ended up at the Texas After Violence Project. Grief is central to every interview we do, and every interview we do underscores the words of grief psychologist J. William Worden, who says, “each person’s grief is like all other people’s grief; each person’s grief is like some other person’s grief; and each person’s grief is like no other person’s grief.”¹ I have found meaning in these interviews, even while recognizing that the circumstances surrounding the deaths described by our interviewees are uniquely traumatizing and unfair. The grief of the people we interview is vastly different from my own, incomprehensibly different, and yet in some ways it is the same, and in becoming an interviewer, I have found meaning in being able to bear witness to the grief of others, and the ability to document the story of their love for those they have lost.
Jennifer Douglas, an archivist teaching at the University of British Columbia, has written of the memory work bereaved parents have done to keep the memory alive of their deceased children. They maintain and even evolve their relationship to their deceased child, essentially continuing to parent the child from this new space. Part of that work means imbuing objects with deep significance. Physical objects from their child’s life (but also digital objects like blogs and facebook pages created or maintained in the aftermath of their child’s death) become vessels for and representative of their relationships to their lost child. Douglas suggests that archivists and other memory workers are mediators of death — just like funeral directors or grief counselors, when we take custody of objects, we are responsible for, as Douglas says, these “material traces of memory that mediate between the living and the deceased.”²
Going back to the context of our interviews with people who have experienced loss at the hands of the state, this is not to say that because these interviews are fully situated within the work people do as they grieve, the interviews themselves are healing or help people cope. I merely mean that by their nature, they are artifacts of grieving. We ask people about their loved ones, about how they cope with their loss, and the stories they tell are stories of redefinition of themselves and their worlds in the wake of their loss. The interviewees pull their loved ones into the present moment, bringing their memory into being in the physical space of the interview.
A few years ago, I interviewed a woman whose loved one had been killed by police. During the course of the interview, it seemed like she was consistently avoiding eye contact, instead staring at a spot behind me, just over my shoulder. On the recording, this detail is probably unnoticeable, since I was sitting off-camera. For me though, it was jarring in the moment, and I kept wondering if the interview was too much for her, if it was re-traumatizing, if we should stop. Before long, we did pause, and she assured me she was comfortable continuing the interview. During the break, while she was in another room, I looked around and realized: the spot she’d been staring at the whole time was a photograph of her loved one. As she described him to me — not just his death, but who he was when he was alive — she was visually clinging to this object that brought him further into the interview space.
Other interviewees do similar things — sharing photographs of their loved ones on camera, pulling them into a new sort of existence, a here-not-here form of being, that makes it possible to continue nurturing the threads of connection that form our relationships to other people, whether they are still with us or not.
This year, of course, has become defined by loss, grief, and grieving, and there is an openness to conversations about the role of grieving in our society, and how we have failed each other in the past. We are grappling with that failure as we explore new ways of mourning — collectively and individually — the 200,000+ people who have died from Covid-19 in the United States. But because we are living in this place in the world, at this moment in time, there still remain strict boundaries between acceptable grief and unacceptable grief. Our culture is still dictating who we can grieve for, even as we are coming to accept grieving as an acceptable condition.
Our work at TAVP this year has been focused on this gap, documenting the stories of people who — according to dominant narratives in our culture, particularly here in Texas — are not seen as worthy of grief and grieving. There are two aspects to this work: first, our project, Sheltering Justice, through which we’ve been conducting virtual oral histories with formerly incarcerated people; people who have been released from confinement as a result of the pandemic; the loved ones of currently incarcerated people; and others who are directly impacted by COVID-19 and mass incarceration. We are also participating in a collective project called Mourning Our Losses, which aims to collect memorials for every person who has died due to the pandemic while living or working behind bars.
The circumstances that these two projects document demonstrate that the broader society still does not believe these are lives worth mourning. The callousness of the actions of administrators demonstrates a belief that no one is watching, no one will care, no one will mourn. The motivation of both of these projects is to prove them wrong.
For that reason, I’d now like to share a portion of a memorial written for Tiffany Mofield, by Mourning Our Losses volunteer Eliza Kravitz. You can read the full memorial at www.mourningourlosses.org.
Reading of Tiffany Mofield’s memorial from Mourning Our Losses
“Tiffany Mofield, affectionately nicknamed “Big Baby,” found life’s greatest joy in her family. A loving daughter, sister, mother, and grandmother, she lived a social life in Salem County, New Jersey. Shatifia Cooke, her daughter, considers her mother her “best friend” and writes on Facebook that “family was everything to my mom” and that Tiffany poured “pure love and affection” onto her children.
Tiffany, 43, passed away on April 29 in Edna Mahan Correctional Center for Women, leaving behind her two parents, three children, and four grandchildren. All are devastated. Shatifia describes her mother’s death as “unbearable” and like “a bad dream I can’t wake up from.” She writes, “I wanted you home but not like this… I waited almost 4 years for that woman to get back out here with me[.] I couldn’t wait to wake up to her cooking breakfast.” Shatifia feels “robbed” of the life she should have had: a life with her mom in it.
The presumptive cause of Tiffany’s death is COVID-19, but she never received a test. In fact, the story of her medical maltreatment is absolutely horrifying. After spending two weeks in the prison’s infirmary in April, Tiffany was discharged to the administrative segregation unit (ad-seg, for short) despite clear, persistent symptoms. Instead of providing medical treatment for her continued illness, prison officials quarantined her in solitary confinement. Tiffany’s condition worsened after she was released from the infirmary, says Michelle Angelina, her friend and neighbor in ad-seg. Michelle describes the protocol for taking showers in ad-seg: women must have on a belly belt and handcuffs, and the shower door must be locked. On April 29, Tiffany was taking a shower when she began calling out that “she could not breathe,” remembers Michelle. Tiffany begged for staff to unlock the door, but no one responded. Perhaps no one was there. Tiffany lost consciousness inside the locked shower. By the time staff members arrived, she was unresponsive. She was dead before the ambulance arrived.”³
The circumstances of Tiffany’s death are heartbreaking — just as heartbreaking as the murder of George Floyd, or the murder of Breonna Taylor. Their stories demand that we remember and demand that we mourn for them, and that we craft a future that makes space for their memory.
A phrase has been tumbling around the internet lately, particularly in reference to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It is a variation of a Jewish blessing, and here I say it for Tiffany Mofield: May her memory be a revolution.
Jane Field is the Associate Director of the Texas After Violence Project.
endnotes
¹As quoted in Douglas, Jennifer, Alexandra Alisauskas, and Devon Mordell. 2019. “‘Treat Them With the Reverence of Archivists’: Records Work, Grief Work, and Relationship Work in the Archives”. Archivaria 88 (November), 84–120. https:/archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13699.
²Douglas, et al. “Treat Them With the Reverence of Archivists.”
³Excerpt from Mourning Our Losses memorial for Tiffany Mofield, written by MOL volunteer Eliza Kravitz with information from Shatifia Cooke on Facebook and reporting by Alice Speri of the Intercept, Mirna Alsharif of CNN, and PR Newswire.
