EVERYTHING AROUND ME WAS SOMEONE’S LIFEWORK

My mother died at the early age of 56, after a very short but intense battle with cancer. Experiences like this are demarcations. Soon after her death, I searched books for any words of comfort or ways to understand what had just happened to me, to us. Ocean Vuong, in his book Time is a Mother put it so succinctly: "After my mother died there were two time zones …. today when she's not here, and the big, big yesterday when I had her".

The experience of loss conjures thoughts on the story of one’s life. Who gets to tell? Who’s perspective is truth? In her book Mothers, Fathers and Others, Siri Hustvedt speaks so clearly on the matter. Her family lineage was housed in meticulous record-keeping her grandfather had written in a small notebook. This was archived at St.Olaf and became the narrative of their family despite minimizing the impact of Tillie, his wife.

These questions of narrative ownership naturally draw me to the idea of the ‘process as presentation’, the idea that the journey is just as important as the destination. Women I look up to most, like Claire Steyaert, have incredible archives of research from years of travel and the study of art and antiquities. Current projects like the historic Batcher Block Opera House and its steward Colleen Frost, also beg for not only a physical archive of incredible costuming and artifacts, but a place to express how our legacies merge as we care for stories that are larger than us. I bid on an auction lot of art books. Upon retrieval, I found that the pages were full of research notes, family postcards, ephemera and other timestamps of the life Bridgie Sandager, who died at age 101, an archivist at the University of Minnesota. She met her husband, Robert Sandager, when he was abroad as an Olympian in shooting sports. They married and relocated to Minnesota. Now hundreds of her books live in the cases of Maison Bodega.

I have felt more compelled than ever to document the minute and the grand elements of life. When viewed in a total expression, everything around me was someone’s lifework.