She had always felt a pull towards the untold and the uncelebrated, always the only guest at the silent festivities she threw for the ‘un-’ words. She became confused about the notion of status in archives, panicked about things disappearing and would methodically write facts and histories down, filling countless amounts of disjointed notebooks. She was unknowingly disorganising the arrangement of things that had shaken her. In her day to day she wanted to protect everything that had never been deemed worthy of archival gloves - things history was deciding didn’t deserve official catalogs, stories that weren’t given the chance to belong to collective knowledge. She became the industry’s worst archivist as she chronicled these things in her own way, at her own pace, with the only toolbox she knew of: she celebrated them. If she could, she wore them. Where she could, she spoke to them. When she could, she contacted remaining family members or trusted keepers. However she could, she brought them to life. She willed them into existence and squeezed her life into what remained of theirs. She became a dealer of echoes, bargaining and haggling with the complications of space. The cries she wanted to informally resurrect found themselves with no crypt to hide in. Journals, though a raging party, became a cemetery of untold histories. Now she’s haunted by the idea they are wailing.

The object’s wishes and the story’s destiny are not entirely for the archivist to establish. Both skeletons of memory have a final choice to decide where they go, and most importantly, who tells of them. How many times had she tried to write about pasts she wasn’t meant to touch, grappling with unbreakable walls? She would find it hard to passionately discuss things she wasn’t meant to speak of, no matter what feelings they had stirred in her. When the object wanted her to rescue it from oblivion, she knew it was right. It became a visceral thing, an umbilical ribbon. This will have happened to so many of you: found objects and signatures, labels and stories instigating months if not years of rabbit holes, with mysteries evolving serendipitously and gut feeling guiding the way. She started writing about and relaying 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 their languages are an advocate for care, comfort, love and community against the hard damage of neglect. She had become an archivist the same year she had gotten an important health diagnosis so she was learning about both worlds at the same time, initially unaware they were using the same dictionary. Gradually she understood she was protecting the nimble skeletons of the past. (“Bodices are boned,” she once said in an interview.) Stories so strong and inspiring, untouched and unarchived, showed the most fragile things were in fact the most powerful. She was finding stories that resembled her own, manuals on ways of existing that she could relate to and events that made her hopeful. Archival work whatever its unraveling shape became a beating semaphore. She soon understood how many of these stories had catapulted themselves into lives and lodged themselves under the tutelage of people around her and sometimes in her own (ungloved) hands. She speaks often of the fact that when in the care of memory’s chosen archivist, what floats finds its space and can’t leave this world twice. (Filomena is the cemetery’s care-taker after all.)