Legacy and the Hidden World of Archives with Emily Cabaniss

When we think about end-of-life, we rarely think about archivists, but maybe we should. Emily Cabaniss, a Seattle-based archivist, shares how her work preserving the personal records of the deceased offers profound insight into grief, legacy, and dying. Her reflections reveal how archivists often act as invisible companions to the dead, holding space for stories left behind.

As an archivist in the Pacific Northwest, Emily works with unique historical records, from personal letters to business documents, textiles, and audio recordings. Her job involves preserving these items and making them accessible, ensuring the legacies of individuals and communities are not lost to time. She explains that an archive is not just a storage room but a program focused on the care, description, and access of primary sources. Emily shares how deeply relational this work can be, especially since most of the people she interacts with through the records are deceased.

She reflects on the emotional and ethical complexities of handling someone’s personal materials after they’ve died. From diary entries to correspondence, archivists like Emily witness the private lives of people who will never know they’re being seen. This creates a unique form of grief, parasocial connections to those long gone, where the archivist feels close to a person whose descendants will never know them.

Her experiences working with homicide files also highlighted the troubling ways society views death, particularly the objectification of victims. It made her more aware of how records contribute to someone’s legacy and how archivists play a crucial role in shaping how that legacy is remembered.

Emily’s story is a powerful reminder that healing, grief, and conscious living extend far beyond immediate end-of-life care. The work of archivists intersects with death care in unexpected ways, holding sacred space for memory, identity, and humanity.

To be part of Emily’s end-of-life project, reach out to her ecabaniss@winthropgroup.com

Transcript

Emily: [00:00:00] From the technical perspective of an archivist is that doing paper legacy work means that you never have to worry about in 25 years, computers are different and you can no longer open that file. You have lost that email, but if you have a paper, as long as you can read, you have the paper.

Jill: Welcome back to Seeing Death Clearly, I'm your host. Jill McClennen, a death doula and end-of-life coach. Here on my show, I have conversations with guests that explore the topics of death, dying, grief, and life itself. My goal is to create a space where you can challenge the ideas you might already have about these subjects. I want to encourage you to open your mind and consider perspectives beyond what you may currently believe to be true.

This week in my End of Life Clarity Facebook group, we talked about what happens to our stuff after we die. Things like letters, journals, and old photos. Do we have to save them? Do they matter? We even talked about how Martha Washington burned almost all of her letters from George Washington before she died.

That post ties in perfectly with this week's [00:01:00] podcast guest, Emily Ka, an archivist from Seattle. Emily works with personal records of people who have died. She helps save things like letters, diaries, and old recordings. So that these stories don't get lost. In our conversation, we talk about how archives are more than storage.

They're full of love, memory, and identity. Emily shares what it's like to feel close to people she'll never meet, and the special kind of grief that it can bring. We also talk about hard things like how society sees death in crime cases. It's a great conversation about how we're remembered and who carries out our stories when we're gone.

After you listen, come join us in the Facebook group to keep the conversation going. Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Welcome, Emily to the podcast. Thank you for coming on today. I'm gonna let you talk about your project, which is why I've reached out to you to have you on the podcast. Just start us off, tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from, how old you are, anything like that you wanna share.

Emily: Yeah, for sure. My name is Emily Kaus. I live in Seattle, [00:02:00] Washington, and I am a born and raised Pacific North Westerner. I work as an archivist, the person who takes care of historical records and collections. I work for a consulting firm called The Winthrop Group, a nationwide firm, but I do projects in the Pacific Northwest with a lot of different organizations and a lot of different archives.

But before that I worked in government archives and for a theater here in Seattle. I worked for Seattle Operas. Their archivist and my internships before that were also about Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. Organizations unique to this region, like the Museum of Glass in Tacoma and Den Show here in Seattle.

I think of myself as really ingrained and. The Pacific Northwest archivist preserving my local history and stories. I, you know, love my work and a variety of archives and that I'm about 10 years into my career and I'm learning new stuff all the time, and I love getting to talk to people about archives.

Jill: Yeah. And actually, so what is an ar? Archivist? [00:03:00] Archivist? Yeah, so like, I don't really know exactly, I think I get the general idea, but like you just sit and read 

Emily: books. I wish that I saw and read books. That would be so nice. But first I'll explain what an archivist, that phrase gets used a lot to describe like old stuff.

Like people will be like, oh, put it in the archive. Or like, there will be like a folder on your desktop that's labeled archive and it's just where you drag documents when you're done with them. And I like to clarify this when I talk about what an archive is. An archive is not the stuff, and it's not the space the stuff is in, whether that's a folder, a closet, or room.

An archive is a program dedicated to the description, preservation and access to that stuff. I work with primary sources, unique records created by whoever I'm archiving for. I run a program that. Describes preserves and makes them accessible. So description, looking like I'm creating catalogs and [00:04:00] inventories of what is in the, you know, collection of records and making sure that it can be found.

And also making sure that you know what's in there is identified and is supposed to be in there. Um, I'm doing preservation actions, so I'm doing things like recognizing that like paper can be really acidic and it can eat other paper up, and so I put things in acid free folders and boxes. I do a lot of work with textiles and so a lot of my preservation work is, is textile preservation, specifically work with all kinds of records.

I know a little bit about how to make everything live forever. Then making that stuff accessible. So responding to reference requests and people who want to use the archive and don't know what's in there, you know, I know what's in there. 'cause I just did all of the preservation and description and so kind of linking people to that information.

It's not like a librarian. 'cause I think of librarians as connecting people to. Information sources, and then you know those people take those information sources and interpret [00:05:00] them however they want. Librarians work with resources that are replicated, information like books and journals and articles.

Archivists work typically with unique items. I work with business records a lot. I work with objects that are unique. I work with tape recordings and photographs that are original. It's not like a museum because a lot of times I am working with records that are like. Multiple boxes of material that all kind of cover the same topic, and I'm sort of indexing those, but not describing every single item in every box.

It's something in between like it, like there's like a, there's like an access of like. Information and collections care professionals, and I think archivists sit right in between. So yeah, that's what I do most of the time. There's some storytelling in archives too, just because when you work as an archivist, you get to know the things in your collection usually better than anybody else.

A lot of times you have this opportunity to see connections and identify stories and narratives that exist in your collections [00:06:00] in a way that can be unique. Just because you've seen everything I say. I'm not a historian, but I'm history adjacent. It's very interesting and we work with, um, multiple kinds of clients.

We end up interacting with lots of different collections and I think that myself and other archivists end up building this really esoteric kind of patchwork of knowledge that just depends on what repositories we've ended up working in. Like. I worked as an archivist for Seattle Opera, so I developed a ton of knowledge about opera, but it's a different kind of knowledge than I would've developed if I had been a musicologist.

I work with some businesses and I develop a lot of knowledge about this particular business or industry, but it's through one business as archives. It's really different than if I was involved in the industry in another way. Then I meet other archivists. To work for fisheries, government, or at an academic setting, and I do collections for specific people and learn a lot about that person's life.

We all get this patchwork of experience and it's really interesting 

Jill: all of the time. [00:07:00] Yeah, that sounds really interesting actually. I think that seems like work I would probably really love. How did you get into it? I don't know anybody that does the work. I don't know anybody that's like, this is my dream job.

So how is that something you get into? 

Emily: I meet a lot of people who didn't start out as archivists. They started out doing something else and realized they like being archivists. I did something similar except I was a little bit closer to archives. I am a trained librarian. I have a master's in librarian Information Science, and I always wanted to be a librarian.

When I was growing up, my first job was in the public library. I worked in libraries. For my college jobs. I had two jobs in college. I worked in a library and a costume shop, so it made sense. Yeah. I wanted to be a librarian and I didn't know what kind of librarian I wanted to be, but I knew that I wanted to do that.

I finished a bachelor's degree in art history 'cause they had told me it didn't matter what your bachelor's degree was in, I got a bachelor's in art history and then I went to the University of Washington for graduate [00:08:00] school. I went to the high school and I got an MLIS. I didn't really know what kind of librarian I wanted to be.

There's public librarians, college librarians, and special librarians, which is what I ended up being a special librarian. Works in an organization as the librarian, but it's not a library organization. I got a gig as the librarian for Seattle Opera. I had been working in their ticket office while finishing my master's degree and while I was working.

As a librarian for them. First of all, they had an archive but no archives program. Right. They had the stuff, but they didn't have the program. And they kind of asked me, that sort of fell under my purview as a librarian. And so I started working on projects for their archive. I had some archival training in my graduate degree, but not, um, an extensive amount.

I. I had this project to digitize 1100 VHS and beta tapes for them. I learned how to digitize tapes. I got a capture card. Learned how to correct color and sound after digitizing. [00:09:00] I learned how to bake a tape. Like tapes can get sticky and nasty, and if you bake them in a convection oven at a really low temperature, a tape can be salvaged by baking it.

The opera didn't have an oven that was safe to put the tapes in, so instead of baking them in an oven, I used a cardboard box, a hair dryer, and a meat thermometer, and would bake the tapes in this like makeshift oven for two hours. I remember I had it set up in the break room one time. Someone walked in and saw me like sitting there with the hairdryer and just walked right out, no questions.

They just turned around and laughed. It was really funny. I learned how to do all that stuff and I really, really liked doing that stuff, and I liked doing it more than I liked. Helping people do research or finding people books. I liked touching stuff. I realized that I was a bit of a gearhead. I've always liked doing hands-on work.

I really couldn't believe that I could do this stuff. And it was so fun. I feel like I had a really good attitude about it. I wasn't scared to like break anything. 'cause I was like, well right now we're not using it. [00:10:00] So what's the problem if I experiment with this, you know, preservation method and you know, what's the problem if I install the software and test it?

So. I had this great attitude of like, it can't get worse. So I taught myself a ton of skills and then took some archival courses through the Society of American Archivists. I. Decided I really liked that. Ended up getting a full-time archivist gig through King County, which is the county that Seattle is based in.

And yeah, now work is a, you know, very flexible like consulting archivist. And so yeah, I came at it in kind of a odd way, but it really was just like realizing I love to touch stock. That's what I wanna do. I love to take stuff apart. I love a day where I get to get out my mini screwdriver kit and just do archival work.

Now I do a lot of writing and talking, so it's a little bit different, but that was what I really liked about it, was doing that work. One other thing I'll say is I think a lot of people pivot to archives because they don't like to talk to people. Librarians talk to people all the time, and [00:11:00] archivists are usually pretty isolated.

Even for me, I think I'm a pretty high contact archivist. I interact with a lot of people for my job, but I still probably get 35 hours a week of just working, which is great. People think of archival work as not relational. They don't have to do relational work. That's not true. It is in fact, deeply relational work because you are working with the records of people.

And relating to them through your work, whether you like it or not. Um, the difference is that they're usually dead, which is where this project starts. 

Jill: Yeah. And that's why I wanna talk to you. Yeah. Because obviously I think a lot about death and dying and legacy. I think about what we leave behind and even now we're in this age of digital legacy.

Not that it's gonna be there forever. I don't think that's really always true, but I don't think we think about that sometimes. Now it's so easy to type something or take pictures. The [00:12:00] post that I ever made on social media that got the most comments and people real angry was I was like, Hey. What are you doing with all your spicy photos?

Because one day somebody's gonna have to find them and people are real mad. Like, I paid a lot of money for my boudoir photos, and I'm like, I'm not talking about those. 

Emily: Yeah. 

Jill: If you've got kids, family, what's your plan? Because somebody's going to find them and yeah. It actually. What are you gonna do about that?

Emily: It's the archivist that finds them. I can tell you I have found the historical equivalent of a nude. It's not super common, but the archivists will read them and look at them. 

Jill: Yeah. You know, again, is okay. I'd honestly rather have an archivist find it than my children, you know? Yeah. It's 

Emily: definitely, it can be sensitive.

I get a lot of requests from people who want to transfer their stuff to the archive, but then they'll say, I don't want anyone to read it. And I say, well, who's gonna read it? We can't just take stuff in and hide it. It's not a vault, but we can close it [00:13:00] for 25 years so your kids don't read it. We can say there's something in between that, but yeah.

What are you gonna do with your spicy photos? Many archivists are willing to talk about closure. I think there's a question of enduring historical value. Does your N have enduring historical value? Maybe. I think that's contextual. Respectfully. Most of them don't. They serve a purpose that is long passed by the time it's time for the archive.

Jill: Yeah. No, and I have no judgment for people taking them, having them. But I have talked to a lot of people at this point, just about all kinds of stuff, and there are people that are like, yeah, I found those pictures after my mom died, and it was kind of traumatizing. Like I didn't need to see that. I did not need to see my parents naked.

No judgment, no shame, but I can't unsee it now that I saw it. And so once I had that conversation. I was like, oh, that's true. Like I don't want that for my kids to ever think, oh, I really didn't find that. 

Emily: Where we need to start thinking about the narrative that we leave [00:14:00] behind. Obviously, I. Nudes are a good example of that because they're so like stark.

But there's other things too, like things that you say about people candidly that you might not have said in front of them and you feel embarrassed when you think about them learning about it or like opinions that you might have held once, but then no longer hold. But those make it into your legacy.

It's hard if you don't know somebody to distinguish is this what you really thought or is this what you thought one time? And then you grew and changed. There's a lot of. One of the things when I've been talking with people who work in end of life care and support is they remark on how as people are dying or start to acknowledge their death, they start feeling a lot of anxiety about how they will be perceived.

I. Through their stuff and records been thinking, I would not dare to give an answer to that, except that when I do stuff, I think about that for myself. Like, is this, is this an action I wanna have taken? [00:15:00] And like, is this an action that's gonna look good with like no context and without me around to explain it later?

But yeah, that's a tough one. 

Jill: Yeah, I even have journals where I've written stuff. My daughter's 11 now and a couple months ago because we talk about death all the time, like mm-hmm. A big deal, right? Mm-hmm. So she said. After you die, can I read your journals? And I was like, of course you can after I die.

And I was like, also though, keep in mind that those were some of the worst points in my life when I was writing in them. So please do not take anything that you read and make it seem like that's the way that I felt about everything, or that's the way I always felt. Because I don't wanna get rid of the journals and I don't care if she reads them after I die.

But I did start to think about that and realize, yeah, there's probably some things in there that if she's gonna read it and think, oh, is that the way mom really felt? Yeah. At that time, that was how I was feeling for at least part of the time. That's [00:16:00] why a lot of people keep journals, you know? And so, yeah, we don't really think about that kind of stuff when we're living life, except for, for people that work and work like you or like me.

Yeah, where we think a lot about what we leave behind for other people to find. 

Emily: Yeah, and I think there are a lot of people who journal for mental health purposes and things like that. I cannot do that if that is something I could ever do, just because I have read so many journals and every time I do something like that, I can't stop thinking about I.

Someone else reading it in a hundred years. It's funny, I don't feel self-conscious about myself in the now, but journaling is really hard for me to imagine. I feel very embarrassed about the future. 

Jill: I know, and part of me is like nobody's gonna care in a hundred years. Yeah. So then 

Emily: I'm 

Jill: like, I 

Emily: don't know.

Jill: One 

Emily: thing I have done is I've kept planners for a 12 or 13 years now. I still have all of my planners. They write down what I did. They don't write down how I felt about stuff. I use them to manage my schedule and things like that. I think that I'm always interested in whether or not someone would [00:17:00] be interested in them just 'cause it is this.

Record of what I was up to and what I was doing. Yeah. I actually 

Jill: have a planner from when I was in college, so we're talking, it's probably like 1998 or 1999, it was a long time ago. I was working for my college and going to different high schools, recruiting basically. And so I had notes and stuff in there and one day I, a couple years ago was like reading through and I realized that somebody I'm friends with now, I actually went to their high school when they were in high school and I was in college.

And I saw the name of the high school and the teacher, and I was like, any chance you were there? And she was like, I totally was like, oh my God, I. Actually remember you now that you're telling me you were there? Yeah. And she's like, I actually thought you were really dumb. I was like, oh thanks. Oh, okay.

Thanks for sharing. Exactly. I mean, again, she was a senior and I was probably like 21, so it's fine. But even things like that I find interesting looking back on, but I don't know, sometimes I think, are my [00:18:00] kids gonna care? Are my kids' kids? Will there be somebody like you in a hundred years reading my stuff for whatever reason?

Emily: I'll say I always care. I think that one thing that archivists do, whether they want to or not, is end up forming parasocial relationships with the people in their archives no matter how long they have been dead for. And it's very weird 'cause there's zero outlet for it, right? Like you can't say to your friends, like, honestly, I am grieving somebody because I read all of their diaries in their whole life.

And then I got to the end of it. And now I don't know what to do with these emotions. I feel like I got to know this person. They didn't get to know me. I. Their descendants don't get to know me like I am just this anonymous archivist. It's a very weird experience, but I will say for myself, I think some archivists try to steal up and get a little calloused over about it.

My sort of mantra is to stay soft and so if I read your diary, I will love every minute of it. It is such a gift to get to know people that way, but yeah, it is sort of parasocial 

Jill: That is interesting. [00:19:00] I'd never. Really would've thought about that. You're getting to know people in some of ways better than people that knew them.

You know when when you're reading their diaries, 

Emily: you could definitely get a different dimension of them. Even if you don't have a diary, you're reading all of their correspondence, not just the letters sent back and forth to one person. You might be looking at some of their papers instead of the distinct relationships they have with other people.

It's a very. Focused relationship in the sense that you're really focused on that person. They don't know about you, they're not aware of you, and you're just kind of like got like your nose pressed to the window, like seeing. So much about them. It's really odd. Very occasionally I've gotten to meet somebody whose papers I've processed.

Typically, right? People are gone, but sometimes P papers come in when people retire. I've done their papers and then I meet them, and that can be really awkward. A lot of times. I haven't learned anything super embarrassing about them. It's just this imbalance where I know more about them than they know about me, and I feel like I have to be [00:20:00] careful to not be too casual with them.

Because they don't feel like I know them like that, even though I do. It can be really odd. Yeah, I 

Jill: could see how that would be really odd. Yeah, because even with my podcast, and I'm not famous by any means, but I did have somebody once in public recognize my voice. It was fine, but it definitely threw me a little bit where I was like, oh, they.

Know me to a certain extent, and I don't know them at all. 

Emily: Yeah. And I've been on both ends of that, but most of the time I am doing it the other way where I know them, but they don't know me or I feel like I know them. So I'm, I'm a professional stand, I guess, for anybody who's records come into my archives.

Jill: That's really. Strange. That is so cool though. I think it's fascinating. I actually really like it. I'm trying to remember who it was. It's a company in Seattle. Was it the Grief House in Seattle? [00:21:00] I don't remember. Somebody sent on an email. Yeah, they had your name in it, but you were working with them. I was like, I need to reach out to this woman.

I emailed you and I was like, Hey, by the way, you talk to me. 

Emily: It was a sacred passing. They do grief and death support here in Seattle When I contacted them. I didn't realize how far their lists are reached, so I've gotten to talk to a lot of people that are not based in Seattle and as a result, which I appreciate that they were willing to share.

It's been awesome. Two things that sort of sparked the project. There's sort of two areas of how it percolated. First. It percolated through two years of work that I did a couple years ago, and it has been kind of like percolating since then. And then the kickoff was a project that I did last year when I worked for King County.

The majority of my work was redacting and caring for and conducting reference requests on a collection of really notorious homicide files, which was. Not my first encounter with death, but was my first encounter with [00:22:00] mass death. In the archives, the homicide files are connected to a notorious serial killer.

The reference requests were very true crime genre requests. I had never encountered that genre before, and then I was interacting with people producing it all the time. I was horrified by the whole experience, and I spent two years working with these records. It really changed my perspective on how society looks at dead people.

I. Especially how they look at dead women and girls who have been victims of violent crimes. It also made me realize how many archivists are working with evidence of death and sometimes violent death and sometimes mass death. But that death in all of its forms was present in the archives wherever you went because things do not come into the archives usually until people die.

So that's sort of like percolated for a little bit. I. Started working in my current job and we do a lot of writing and [00:23:00] guidance, like writing best practice documents and things like that. I was working on a document on how to close records that are sensitive and how to balance the need for an archive to be usable and accessible with the privacy and dignity of the people who are in your archives.

And the reason I was working on that was because of my experience with these homicide files and I could sort of like kicked off into this thing of like. Realizing that my profession is working with death a lot in a lot of different forms, but does not have a good grasp on. It's a very death avoidant professional culture, which doesn't make sense because it's a very death heavy.

Kind of work. And so I thought, I thought about that and I thought we're interacting all the time with dying and grieving people, and I think that we need to step our game up with the way that we interact with them. I had noticed that intake assessments [00:24:00] for potential records to come into the archives, a lot of times you're interacting with someone who is dying or someone who is grieving and you say, all right, well, how many boxes is it?

What's the format? Where has it been stored? And you should be getting all that info. It's true. You have to do this work, but there was this element that was really missing in our professional practice of why is this important to you? Why is this your legacy? Also, I think there needed to be a lot of room for, tell me about your life.

Tell me about you. I wanna get to know you because I'm going to take care of your records. I noticed that the intake processes seemed a little cold. And unwilling to give time to people, and I thought that was important. I also noticed that our access policies, when we decide who has access to records, and this comes back to like the question of closing sensitive records, I think our access policies can be a little brutal and a little death avoidant in the sense that they are not always affirming of the dignity, humanity, and privacy of dead people in our collections, it depends on the repository that [00:25:00] you're in, but a lot of times we lean more towards access than not access, and that can be.

Pretty harsh to get materials or information about a person's death with no context or information or to get information about a person's death. That is really not in the public interest, but we shared it anyway. 'cause we think about ourselves as open doors and having a lot of transparency in the archive.

You should be able to access the archive, but the people in our archives are still people and they deserve better treatment than just getting pictures of their remains sent to. Organizations are requesters. I never released pictures of human remains, but that has happened in the past. It's not best practice, but people have done that by mistake.

I just thought we need to do better about how we treat dead people in our collections and how we treat dying. People who wanna give us collections and how we treat grieving people, that starts with. US learning how to be death positive death positivity is being integrated into our professional culture.

I also mentioned the concept of archivists leaving people in their [00:26:00] collections. The archivists I worked with and myself too, who worked with these homicide files, had reasonable emotional reactions to working with these records. We were not treated well for that. We were treated like it was unprofessional to have these emotional reactions, and that is a common experience that archivists have too, where they have.

An emotional reaction to stuff, to like horror in the archives and are treated as though they're not up to the task of objective professionality. And what I really wanted to see was a change in how we talked about death for our work processes, but also so that we had a professional culture where that emotionality is a benefit to you as an archivist.

Staying soft makes you a better archivist. It doesn't make you a less professional archivist. In fact, it is. A good thing to bring to the work that you do because you are history adjacent. You are a storyteller when you share records with people and you need to be able to tell stories that are kind and good.

And if you protect yourself by saying, I'm a professional, I don't feel anything, and [00:27:00] anybody who does feel things about these collections is dumb. Like that is not good for the collections. It's not good for each other. So yeah, it started out as what can archivists learn from. Death care workers. I wanted to interview death doulas, hospice workers, hospice volunteers.

I wanted to interview people who talk about death and who are associated with the death positive movement. I got some connections through the order of the Good Death. I've also talked to a lot of archivists, some who work with cemetery records just 'cause of their kind of adjacent, adjacent to death things.

And I wanted to talk to people who are around death all the time, but whose job it is. Who do not have the job of stopping the death. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Emily: And talk to them and, and see what, what could, what are they doing in their work? What are they bringing to their work that we could bring to archives? So that's my question.

What can archivists learn from death care? A sub question is, are archivists part of death and grief care? Because one of the things that [00:28:00] I learned while talking. With death doulas is how often people are concerned about their legacy and how much of it is like a legacy product. So yeah, that's my project so far and it's not a done project.

If you're listening and you wanna talk to me, I wanna talk to you too. 

Jill: I love it so much. And yeah, I mean, even in my work, you know, people will say, well, isn't it sad? And I'm like, well, yes, sometimes it is sad and there is a little part of me. That almost judges myself if I feel emotions because I'm not professional.

But again, who's to say that that's that patriarchal? Bullshit. That's how I feel about 

Emily: it. I think a death avoidant culture is a supremacist culture. Archives have done a lot of work with decolonizing the archive and trying to root that out. But one area that we need to do better at is in our approach to death and a sense of professionality is not, you can be professional and also be sad.

I think sometimes being sad makes you more professional. It [00:29:00] makes you a person who can relate to people, and that's part of your job, right? Mm-hmm. So, I don't know. 

Jill: Well, we don't like feelings. 

Emily: No, they're not good. 

Jill: I mean, to me, this idea that. Feeling sadness is going to get in the way of your work. Just like, doesn't even make sense to me.

Like why does feeling an emotion like that mean that I can't do my job? If anything, it seems like trying to push down emotions requires so much energy that that gets in the way of me doing my job. 

Emily: The acting like having like emotions in your work makes you not objective, I think is a really good way to be super, not objective because you're.

Because you're not not gonna have those feelings. You're just ignoring them, which is way harder to do, and it can really kill your comradery if you're working with other people who are feeling emotions about the work, and you're like, that's not professional. Now, they know that they don't like you. It's hard to work together.

I'm not saying that people should go home in tears every day from their work, but I am saying that. [00:30:00] Not acknowledging the emotional resonance of the work that I do and that you do is sort of ridiculous. Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

Jill: Yeah. And I feel that I wouldn't be in this work if I didn't. Want some of that. You want that connection.

You want to feel something. If I was just going through it like a robot, what? I wouldn't wanna do this work. You need to connect with people. The legacy thing for sure. I mean, that is literally what you're doing is like legacy work on a grand scale, right? 

Emily: Society. 

Jill: Yeah. I love that. I think it's so important for.

Us as humans, right? To have those things. It's for sure tied with death and grief, what we leave behind our legacy, what people are gonna think of when they think of us. Really what you are doing, and a lot of death rule is we do try to do legacy. I'm actually doing a presentation in two weeks, specifically on legacy and different [00:31:00] legacy projects that you can do for yourself to leave behind for your family.

And one of the ones I've heard of it referred to as like an ethical will. I don't know. You can call it whatever you want. Yeah, right. It's like where you're just writing down your values, different experiences you've had in your life. So it's not really, I. A journal. It's not a letter. Yeah. It's a little bit more just like I'm gonna sit down and write out things that I want people to remember about me, that I cared about these causes.

Yeah. That I worked, doing these different things that aren't just our jobs or. You know, the things that, it's gonna be easy for somebody to say like, oh, well, you know, think of me like, oh, she was a pastry chef and then she became a death doula. Yeah. Well, there's a lot more to me than pastry chef and death doula, and so that's something that I love to do is just encourage people to do that.

Writing letters to loved ones so that when you are gone, they have something. [00:32:00] Tangible. I mean, you could do it in an email if you really want, but I think there's something about having that piece of paper that you held. Yeah, that they can now hold and read the words that you left. Yeah. 

Emily: I will also add, this is from the technical perspective of an archivist, is that doing paper legacy work means that you never have to worry about a mediator that can access the stuff.

If you have an email and you save the email and in 25 years computers are different and you can no longer open that file, you have lost that email. But if you have a paper. As long as you can read, you have the paper. I'm a big fan of the letter, not only from a haptic perspective, but also from a long-term preservation perspective.

Jill: Yeah, and I think you could probably do both, right? You could have the letter. Yeah. You kidding? I mean, you could scan it if you want to too Good. And you should keep it with you, do whatever you want with it. But yeah, people love to touch stuff. I look around, even like I've pointed out to people like my plants.

Mm-hmm. A lot of my plants originally came from my grandmother's plants. Yeah. Like some of them are still in the same pots. Yeah. [00:33:00] She's been dead for 14 years. But there's something about knowing that she touched these plants, that she kept them alive, that she interacted with them, that I love it. There's just something really special about that.

Mm-hmm. So, yes, your legacy work is. Really important for people, and I think that's great that you are trying to turn some of the narrative around about what you do. Yeah. It seems so weird to me that they're so 

Emily: death avoidant. I'm sure that there are ISTs that will listen to this and say, well, I'm not death avoidant, but if you're listening to the podcast, you're probably not.

But the majority of our profession is, in my opinion, like pathologically death avoidant, which is so odd. I think that they think of it as this legacy work is about helping people live forever. 

Jill: Mm-hmm. 

Emily: I want us to think about it as this work is not about helping people live forever. It's about helping us remember people who are not.

I think that's a subtle but important distinction. 

Jill: There was another question you asked before the [00:34:00] legacy, and I don't remember what that one was. Something about death positive. Oh yeah, just 

Emily: like I think I talked about a death positive lens for archives. 

Jill: All of our culture really needs a more death positive lens.

I mean, that's why I started a podcast about death because we are so death avoidant and we view it as. This failure almost, and it's like a failure that we've died. No. It's a normal, natural part of the human existence. We will all die. I think so too, right? Yeah. Yeah. It makes so many people not fully live their life.

Even the work that you're doing, I think you fully experience it. If you are connecting with these people and if you're feeling the emotions and I trying to avoid it, it's probably because they don't wanna think about their own death that one day they're gonna be this person somebody else is reading about.

And so if we just turn that off, then that means we don't have [00:35:00] to think about the fact that one day I will not be here and I'm okay with that. 

Emily: I think doing this work has made me a lot more okay with that. I've never been a super, I mean, I came up in a death avoidant culture that's unavoidable, but it felt very easy for me to dip into a more death positive mindset.

I think because of my work, I'm like, yeah, well, I'll look like that. My sister had a baby last year and it was wild to me how many people love to talk about giving birth. The birth experience and they love to tell the details about it too, which is also a change for everybody. But we don't bring that energy to death, even though it's also an inevitable part of being human and something that everybody does.

The contrast between reflecting on. How people talked to my sister before she had her beat. How the women in my family supported and prepared her for that process and the way that we talk about death by comparison. I was like, oh, that doesn't seem 

Jill: right. Yes, and I have. [00:36:00] Thought about this. I'd say a lot in the sense that I've had two children.

Birth is not pretty. There was a whole mess that was going on. Yes, and it was painful. It is definitely a whole thing. I guess the only thing that I can really see and understand is that. It's adding something to people's life when a baby is born. Yeah. When somebody dies, it is a loss, right? Yeah. That person is no longer there for us to interact with and to hug and kiss and do all the things that people like to do with babies, and we get that.

Yeah. It's just unfortunate because. It is a part of life. Yeah. Avoid it. 

Emily: Yeah. And we need ways to comfort and support one another because it's not something that we can get out of doing. You can't get around having people that you love die. You can't get around dying yourself. We have to have a culture that supports one another and has rituals and practice for us supporting each other.

It's [00:37:00] really important. So, yeah. Virtual is so important, and I mean, 

Jill: we're 

Emily: getting there 

Jill: like 

Emily: baby steps. I, I think it's been really interesting when I've talked about this with people. One of the first things they say, well, not with people who work in death, but people who do not like one of the first things they're like, oh, like human composting.

Oh, I think that's really interesting. That's the first thing people are jumping to, but it is, it does see, I see a change how people. Think about dying and death and the willingness to talk about plans and communicate openly. One of the things I've asked all of the death jewels that I've interviewed so far is.

What is one thing that we could do as non death workers to change our culture a little bit? What's something we should all do a little bit more of? And all of them have said the same thing, which is communicate and make a plan. 

Jill: Okay. That was my first thought. Yeah. Communicate and make a plan. Make a plan.

Talk about it with your loved ones. Make it the normal part of your conversation. It's not like [00:38:00] you sit down and have this real deep discussion. You just talk about it throughout. Just 

Emily: think 

Jill: about 

Emily: it. Just know the plan and yeah, it seems like people are reluctant to talk about it or they'll say, I don't have an opinion on this.

But then when they're actually dying, they realize they did have an opinion the whole time, and now they're not getting what they want, which is so sad to me. So yeah, communicating and making a plan has been, 

Jill: yeah. And so many people say to me, well, I don't need this right now. And I'm like, if not right now, when, yeah.

You don't want to think about it when you're in crisis. Yeah. Exactly. I think about when you 

Emily: need this, 

Jill: that you 

Emily: know what to do, it's okay. So yeah, I definitely love the idea of an ethical will. I think I'm gonna do that. It makes me wish that I had ethical wills of all the people I know that have died, even if I feel like I know them, that would make me so happy to see how they perceive themselves.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. But when you live in a death, avoid culture. It's hard to ask people like, Hey, will you write me an ethical will for yourself? But that's one of the other things that I think I'm trying to do is encourage people [00:39:00] that I love to talk more about their deaths in a way that is loving and not uncomfortable for them.

Jill: Because that's all we really can do is like gently encourage our loved ones to have the conversation. And some of it is the superstition. I just actually talked to a woman earlier today where she was like, I don't know. I feel like if I talk about my death, I'm gonna make it happen. I'm like, no, it does not work that way.

It does not work that way. Yeah, it does. I mean, even if it did work that way, I. At least you would be prepared. Yeah. Now I know. I totally get that. And that is the thing I do get it. We're humans. Humans, we're weird. The things we think, the things we believe, the things we feel we're super pret. That's okay.

It's so interesting though. I love this work and I like that we are trying to do more. Death, positive things and that there is death doulas out there and just, you know, so many of us too. Now we're all doing things different. We're all getting into our communities in different ways and doing different types of work, [00:40:00] but really the core of it is this death positive idea that.

Emily: Yeah, we could change the culture as archivists. A lot of times we work with records of deaths that shouldn't have happened. We work with records pertaining to genocides, homicides, and really unjust death. I think it can be hard for us to think about death positivity or the word death positive. That doesn't mean that those deaths were a good thing, but I think what we mean by death positive, at least what I mean when I say death positive, is a culture that doesn't shy away from talking about death.

Because that's a really important part of reconciling these deaths and seeking justice for them with being willing to talk about them. Death positive doesn't mean like, yay dying. It means. Community around something that is really hard, but we support each other through it. Like, yay, community. That's what death positive means to me personally.

Jill: Yeah, that's a great point because I think there is a lot of people that they'll say, oh, so then you're fine with death. Like you'd be fine if your kids died or your husband Oh, not [00:41:00] absolutely would not be fine. Yeah. But that also doesn't mean. I need to put my head in the sand and act like it might not be me, because it could be me.

It's gonna happen to somebody, right? Somebody today, their kid's gonna die. Their husband's gonna die. Why not me? I'm not special. Yeah, it's not me superstitious, knock on wood, it's not me. But also pretending that that's not a reality isn't gonna keep me safe from that happening. 

Emily: Yeah, of 

Jill: course, 

Emily: being prepared is totally fine and good and normal.

Jill: Definitely is, and we are coming up on time. Why don't you let us know If somebody does wanna reach out to you, where's the best place to find you? And I could put links in the show notes. Yeah. But just kind of give us a little rundown. So I will 

Emily: give my email address. I. It's ecas@winthropgroup.com. They can email me and just send me a quick email.

I don't use any other social media for archives work. That's it. Just send me an email and I would love to talk to you. I've talked with [00:42:00] early career deaths. I've talked with like mid late career deaths. I've talked with like cemetery volunteers, so if you feel like I've been doing this, but I don't know if I have any insight, I still really wanna talk to you, so just.

I wanna throw that out there. Like anybody who wants to talk to me, I wanna talk to them about it. Awesome. 

Jill: Well, and I'm happy to talk to you after this or at another time as well, and answer a lot of questions for you. This has been amazing. I knew I wanted to talk to you. I find this all so interesting.

That's great. And I love to talk about archives, so thank you for the opportunity to do that. Well, thanks for explaining it, because I had a vague idea of what it meant. Now it makes a lot more sense in my head. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me and explaining it all to us. Thank you. In my next episode, Caroline FIUs Carpenter shares what she's learned from over 25 years of walking alongside people at the end of life.

She talks about how she got started as a volunteer and slowly found herself sitting at bedsides, listening to life's stories and [00:43:00] holding space for families during some of their hardest moments. She tells us some really moving stories, like helping someone cross the river in their final hours. And also reminds us that grief can be messy and real, sometimes even full of swearing and laughter.

Caroline brings ritual storytelling and a deep sense of care into places that many people are afraid to go. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or family member who might find it interesting. Your support in spreading the podcast is greatly appreciated. Please consider subscribing on your favorite podcast platform and leaving a five star review.

Your positive feedback helps Recommend the podcast to others. The podcast also offers a paid subscription feature that allows you to financially support the show. Your contribution will help keep the podcast advertisement free. Whether your donation is large or small, every amount is valuable. I sincerely appreciate all of you for listening to the show and supporting me in any way you can.

You can find a link in the show notes to subscribe to the paid monthly [00:44:00] subscription, as well as a link to my Venmo if you prefer to make a one time contribution. Thank you, and I look forward to seeing you in next week's episode of Seeing. Death clearly.