When I stood to speak at Jules memorial, I was hollow as a reed. Sadness lapping only at my edges, like a murky pond; even so, enough to make my voice shake. Willa, fellow reed, put her hand on my back to offer support. So too I offered my hand to her when she gave her eulogy.

I had been dreading Jules’ memorial for weeks. It stood submerged in those dark, murky waters. Many days, I couldn’t stand to think of it for long. Yet it loomed before me, in all its gravity, tugging below the surface, shaping whatever waves of thought hovered over the waters. 

We began planning Jules’ memorial in early January. It took shape little by little, over half a dozen conversations with our officiants John and Janet. There are a number of challenges in holding a memorial for a dead child. 

For one, many liturgies are constructed around a different kind of death, bearing titles like “A Celebration of Life.” These ceremonies seem most adequate to the death of the old, or at least those whose demise is not sudden or tragic. They assume that the bereaved have many memories of the dead one, moments that can be celebrated, even amidst the bitterness of separation and loss. Here, the death of a child, particularly during birth, is very different. There is far less to serve as a counterweight to grief.

Another challenge, following closely on the first, is that the orthodox signs and symbols of religious faith that bring comfort to some people bring pain to others. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, perhaps only the Book of Job gives full voice to the chaos and cruelty that are unveiled by tragic death, that great mute monster who swallows our Being, shatters our stories, resists our narrations. Yet even in Job the author — or is it the high priests? — carefully closes the book by offering Job new children and possessions, a symbolic righting of the scales, as if somehow the new could replace the old; nonetheless, an effort to keep the darkness of death from unraveling an entire worldview. I have told you of the comfort religious rituals bring, but I must tell you that they can bring pain too, when they feel as uncomfortable, as ill-fitting, as the sack-cloth you have donned to sit beside Job. Fortunately, our planning committee of four included two theologians, and two ordained pastors, and so we were able to create a ritual to hold us in this moment.

The main difficulty of Jules’ memorial, though, was not liturgical or religious, but psychological. The memorial was another cairn, another milestone, another moment of reckoning with Jules’ death. Each conversation in planning the memorial was a kind of repetition, a loop in thought and feeling, as we attempted again and again to digest that terrible reality: 

Jules is dead and so the event we are holding for him is a memorial; not a baptism, not a birthday party, not a celebration of his arrival. 

Jules is dead and so the event we are holding for him is a memorial; not a graduation party, not a wedding, not a celebration of a new job.

Jules is dead and the event we are holding for him is a memorial. 

Jules is dead.

This is what Sigmund Freud, the Austrian father of psychoanalysis, describes as the work of mourning in his classic essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” Mourning is coming to terms with the fact that the one we love is no longer there to be loved. Freud writes in cold, clinical terms that this involves the “testing of reality,” and that it “is carried through bit by bit, under great expense of time and cathectic energy, while all the time the existence of the lost object is continued in the mind. Each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the object is brought up and hyper-cathected.” In this way, mourning resembles melancholia, draining the subject of their vitality and interest in all other matters.

Much of Freud’s description is phenomenologically apt, particularly the idea that reckoning with Jules’ death takes place “bit by bit.” Many days, my mind spends a great amount of energy cycling through an endless stream of thoughts, memories, hopes, fears. There is indeed a cyclical feeling to this, a feeling of repetition, not only because certain thoughts and feelings come up again and again, but because they have their unity in a single fact: Jules is dead. That is the Ur-thought, the thing around which all subsequent meaning swirls. 

For the last five months, Willa and I have largely undertaken this work in private, as a family. We travel these circles of thought and feeling just the two of us. This is not because you have left us or forgotten us. Quite to the contrary, we have continued to receive kind messages, phone calls, and care packages. But we have been expending such a great deal of psychic energy that, for many months, we have found it difficult to spend time with more than a handful of other people. These letters that I have written are an exception. Somehow, it is easier to write these words than speak them.

Yet, in the solitude of our mourning, there has been a recurrent set of fears that creep into our minds, particularly as the days since Jules’ death have turned to months. We fear that perhaps we imagined all of last year, all of Willa’s pregnancy, that Jules’ very birth and death have been a dream. We fear that some may not understand the kind of loss that we have suffered, may not grasp that Jules’ death is something very different than a miscarriage, that our child was fully formed and fully capable of living outside the womb. We fear that some may think that we should have gotten over Jules’ death by now and should have moved on with our lives. These fears may not be rational, but they are there. Other bereaved parents we have spoken to, who have lost their babies in a similar manner, have told us that they know these fears as well. Perhaps this, too, is why I have written these letters. 

The fact that Jules’ memorial was a communal event is what set it apart from our daily work of mourning. We humans are, according to Aristotle, political animals. By this he meant that naturally, as a necessary part of our very being, we require a broader community to flourish. For it is only within a community of free equals that we learn how to think and feel, how to act, how to contemplate. Heidegger and Wittgenstein both built on this fundamental truth, deepened it, by revealing the ways in which our very world is found in community. Only here, among our fellow human beings, do we co-create the world, construct reality itself through the shared practice of language, reason, custom. Making the world is a collective act; no one can do it alone, no man, no woman, no family.

The communal nature of Jules’ memorial made it different from our familial repetitions of grief. By joining together with us at the memorial, our family and friends recognized Jules’ death. It is true that many of you have already recognized Jules’ death, in many interactions and encounters. But by having so many gather with us, together, at the same time, in a visible manifestation of community, you made Jules’ death real. This is one very weighty reason why the memorial was so dreadful as it approached, why I could feel its pull in the murky waters.

What was very much less expected, at least for me, was that I felt comforted by the memorial. People had said they hoped I would, but beforehand all I could feel was apprehension. Yet the recognition of Jules’ death, and of our loss, was also a recognition of Jules. We shared what we could of Jules with you. In doing so, we made him koinon, common, shared with our koinonia, our community. By coming to receive him, you made Jules real in a significant way — whatever that might mean to the many different people who attended the memorial, because the world may start in community, but each of us individually also has a hand in shaping it. This allowed for a different kind of cathexis than is available solely to the individual or the family.

There was another fear about the memorial, though, which was that it represented a kind of end, a kind of finality. The thought of such an end is particularly bitter when you hoped that you were just at the beginning, but now find that one communal event is standing in for the dozens of different communal events you were anticipating stretching ahead: birthdays, graduations, weddings, and so on.

While Freud makes a number of incisive observations in his “Mourning and Melancholia,” he also treats mourning as if it has a simple end. He talks of the work of mourning as a process whereby the libido detaches itself from the love-object in order to become “free and uninhibited again,” so that it can reattach itself to new love-objects. As if the mind were some kind of sea-creature, who sends out tentacles from the murky water to grasp the beloved, then slowly withdraws them one-by-one as it crawls back into the pond, waiting eagerly to find new lovers. Towards the end of his essay, however, he finds himself with a puzzle. Namely, if the process of mourning means the withdrawal of the libido from the love-object, then why shouldn’t the mourner emerge triumphant, and seek out new love-objects to latch onto like “a starving man after bread”?

This puzzle, in my view, demonstrates the limits of Freud’s theoretical model of mourning. While it is true that the mourner cannot sustain the devotion of endless psychological energy in mourning indefinitely, to portray the process as a total withdrawal of libido whose endpoint is the mere substitution of other love-objects seems both unfeeling and mistaken. From my vantage point as a mourner, the difficulty I face is rather finding a way to sustain my connection to Jules’ in some new and terrible and unexpected way — while acknowledging his absence and my need to go on living, to make something of my life, this very thing which he was denied. 

Holding a memorial, then, is not simply to make a marker of the end. Memorializing someone is not only to recount memories of their life and death, but to place them in communal memory. For we have a shared fear that in death we shall be forgotten by our family, friends, acquaintances and co-workers. This erasure from communal memory is a second death, in some ways more real and more permanent than the first, for we fear that it shall travel backwards in time and wipe out the significance of our very existence. This is why the wealthy give great sums of money to have their names emblazoned on buildings and why it matters who nations choose to commemorate with holidays and stone monuments. To hold a memorial is to say that, at least for now, at least among these people, we will remember, and the beloved’s existence will be carried onward, an afterlife in memory and meaning.