I have always gravitated towards the untold and the uncelebrated, throwing silent parties for the ‘un-’ words. Throughout my adulthood I have collected snippets of history. I had become increasingly worried about things disappearing and would methodically write facts and histories down, again and again, filling countless amounts of notebooks. I was unknowingly organising my own memory archive of things that had moved and shaken me. In my day to day I wanted to protect everything that had never been deemed worthy of archival gloves - things history was deciding didn’t deserve official catalogs and weren’t given the chance to belong to collective knowledge. I chronicled them in my own way, at my own pace, with the only tool I had: I celebrated them. My journals became a cemetery of untold histories. Now I am haunted by the idea they are wailing.

The wishes of the object and story’s destiny are not for the archivist to establish. Both have have a final choice to decide where they go, and most importantly, who tells of them. How many times have I tried to write articles I wasn’t meant to, grappling with unshakeable writers’ block? I would find it hard to passionately discuss things I wasn’t meant to speak of in conversation, no matter what feelings they had stirred in me. When the object wanted me to rescue it from oblivion I knew it was right. It became a visceral thing. This will have happened to so many of you: found objects and signatures, labels and stories instigating months if not years of rabbit holes, serendipitously mainly. I started contributing to a wonderful platform, A Women’s Thing, where I relayed the work of women discovering the discarded work of forgotten ones, each of them demonstrating through tales of coincidence and relentless research that they were, in fact, the correct mediums through which the story could pass one last time. 

There are undeniable similarities in the archiving and health vernaculars. Separately and together the language is an advocate for care, comfort, love and community. I had become an archivist the same year I had gotten an important health diagnosis. I was learning about both worlds at the same time, initially unaware they were speaking the same language. Gradually I understood I was protecting the nimble skeletons of the past. (“Bodices are boned,” I once said in an interview.) Stories so strong and inspiring, untouched and unarchived, showed the most fragile things were in fact the most powerful. Filomena is the cemetery’s care-taker after all. 

Slowly but surely I understood how many of these stories had catapulted and lodged themselves under the tutelage of people around me and in my own hands. When my health took another turn, I understood there were wailing murmurs needing to be told. The invisible deserves a place to rest. I speak often of the fact that when in the care of archivists, what floats finds space and can’t leave this world twice. I invite you all to share your wailing archives stories and memories, whether past or present: there are no good futures without them. You can’t bury stories alive.