Still Life with Bones Quotes

“Recent psychological research on grief favors meaning making over closure; accepts zigzagging paths, not just linear stages; recognizes ambiguity without pathology; and acknowledges continuing bonds between the living and the dead rather than commanding decathexis. But old ideas about grief as a linear march to closure still hold powerful sway. Many psychologists and grief counseling programs continue to consider “closure” a therapeutic goal. Sympathy cards, internet searches, and friendly advice often uphold a rigid division between healthy grief that the mourner “gets over” and unhealthy grief that persists. Forensic exhumation, too, continues to be informed by these deeply rooted ideas. The experiences of grief and exhumation related by families of the missing indicate something more complex and mysterious than “closure.” Exhumation heals and wounds, sometimes both at once, in the same gesture, in the same breath, as Dulce described feeling consoled and destroyed by the fragment of her brother’s bones. Exhumation can divide brothers and restore fathers, open old wounds and open the possibility of regeneration—of building something new with the “pile of broken mirrors” that is memory, loss, and mourning.”
― Alexa Hagerty, Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains

“As Arendt observes, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Alexa Hagerty, Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains

“It is one story among many. Every bone tells a life. Every person lost was a world.”
― Alexa Hagerty, Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains

“There is a hidden materiality to texts—a word that originally meant “weaving,” a connection seen in “texture.” Forests haunt writing: The English word for “book” is related to “beech tree” by its Germanic root, and “library” comes from the Latin for “the inner bark of trees.” In most Indo-European languages, “writing” comes from carving and cutting. Language carries the memory of words etched into wood tablets, tree trunks, and bones.”
― Alexa Hagerty, Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains

“A complex and controversial figure, Lacan held therapy sessions for ten minutes or three hours, seduced patients, freely belched and farted, all while rubbing shoulders with the most prominent intellectuals of his day.”
― Alexa Hagerty, Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains