Diaspora: Death without a landscape

Abstract

The first wake for a friend who drove too fast and died too young, the heartache that accompanied the death of a beloved pet, the loss of grandparents exacerbated by witnessing a parent's anguish, all these little sorrows did nothing to prepare me for the ferocity of grief when it arrived swift and deadly. Two parents died in rapid succession, one expected, one unexpected, one suffered long lingering death, the other a swift, painful, and reluctant extermination. The tombstones match: each born in 1935, each dead in 2004. Their deaths changed the trajectory of my research and of my life. Bereavement, as I experienced it, was corporeally paradoxical. The gravitational pull of grief was a heavy burden I carried each day, weighing me down, dragging me ever earthward. And yet, I felt at the same time unfettered and groundless, for the landscape of home and of family seemed now lost to me forever. As I drove to the cottage that summer, roadside memorials en-route would snag my glance, drawing sorrow outwards towards these markers of tragic death. No bodies lay here along the roadside and yet grief and sorrow seemed physically present; I could sense its presence within my body and the landscape. In the itinerant state of my mourning, the roadside memorials became an impetus for research, and the landscape a dwelling place for diasporic grief. As an assistant professor in landscape architecture, the role the landscape may play in the mediation of grief became of interest to me. This paper explores this question: 'Do grief and death need a landscape to dwell in?'

"I have such sad news": Loss in Finnish North American Letters

“…Karen Wilson Baptist, writing about the death of her parents, reflected on the feeling of being "unfettered and groundless, for the landscape of home and of family seemed now lost to me forever." 42 Place serves as an especially poignant marker of self in the letters of migrants. The moment of departure and the lines between the here and there of migration become deeply engraved.…”