Your life/death: Charlene Lam
Using curation as a form of celebration
When I started exploring the death space for Papillon, a friend told me I had to meet Charlene Lam. And I’m so glad I did. After a vivacious Zoom where we talked animatedly about our mutual passion for sharing alternative approaches to death and grief, I knew I had met a kindred spirit.
Charlene runs The Grief Gallery out of Lisbon and speaks and coaches on grief globally. Through the Grief Gallery she helps people curate objects and commission artwork into an exhibition as an alternative form of a memorial.
She came upon this solution naturally as she emptied out her mother’s house after her passing and found her self drawn to certain objects that brought back special memories. It took many months to empty out the house but she held on to a few key items that she eventually put on display in a gallery exhibition to honour her mother.
The reality that most of us have way too many belongings (and that we as a society don’t have the same attachment to family heirlooms we once did) means there is often so much stuff to deal with upon a death. Swedish death cleansing or Döstädning, helps us rethink our relationship with things before a person dies. But when framed right, sorting through a loved one’s items can be a therapeutic (and not just essential) activity to do after a death too.
In considering what items you might keep and/or display Charlene suggests asking yourself three questions:
How do you remember this person?
All the ways you remember them. How they lived…and died. The circumstances of the loss. Realities of the relationship. The good things and the bad things.
How do you want to remember them?
Then you start to choose what you want to hold on to. Begin to untangle the positive and challenging elements of who they were. You can highlight and spotlight different moments, different memories, and different facets of them.
How do you want your person to be remembered?
And lastly think about how you want others to remember them? What legacy do you want to help them leave?
In selecting the items you keep you can actively choose how you want to remember and have them be remembered. Some of the other stuff - the tricky elements all humans have as part of their being - can fade away and you can focus in on what parts of your loved one you really want to live on.
“You start to do the curating, choosing items in line with how I'm choosing to actively remember them. People don't ask themselves that enough, right?
What's gonna matter to you? And how do you want to keep those memories? How do you want to stay connected to them? Where do you want to speak to them? What are those experiences going to look like?
That's such an important part of setting yourself up for the grief.”
When we take a person’s things to display or exhibit, we’re curating them not just for ourselves but also for a wider audience - helping set up a loved one’s legacy.
And with this process you can help choose what your future relationship with the person you have lost will look like.
For more on Charlene Lam visit www.curatinggrief.com and follow @curating_grief. You can also the new Curating Grief podcast and join her free monthly gathering on the last Wednesday of every month at https://curatinggrief.com/gathering