In her recent CSSH article, “The Decay-Life of Things” (66-4, 2024), Marisa Karyl Franz examines processes of decay at at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, where bodies, graveside tributes, and the natural surroundings are all in various stages of living, dying, and decaying. In this essay, Franz tells us more about how she became attuned to decay, rot, and ruin, and why she proposes we live as companions with death and decaying things.
During graduate school, I had a work study position in the Rare Books Division of Special Collections at University of Chicago Libraries. Every day, I would physically pick up rare books, open them, touch the pages, and carry them to and from the shelves. One day, I took a turn with my library cart too fast and the books on it were jostled and began to fall. I reached out and blocked them with my arm, but one tumbled down and the cover was torn off. Seeing the leather binding ripped and the cover separated on the floor, I remember thinking of my already accumulating student loan debt and calculating what the cost of this book would add to that looming amount of owed money. Walking back to my director’s office with the damaged book, I was numb in the cold, climate-controlled underbelly of Regenstein Library. In the end, my director looked at the book, cautioned me against rushing around, reminded me of the unwieldy nature of library carts’ wheels, and told me to pass the book along to the staff who worked on conservation to be repaired. I was not fired, and I did not have to cover the cost of the book; I was told that accidents happen, while being reminded that they happen more when we are rushing or distracted.
Foundationally, the book ripped because I was moving it. I was moving it to check and update its cataloguing information to ensure that the data was accurate so that others could find the book to use it themselves. Libraries are staged for borrowing, loaning, touching, and holding. The intimacy of cradling a book, touching the paper, smelling the leather, and, sometimes, finding a bookmark or note left in place by a previous reader changes our relationship with the materiality of the library’s collection, and we leave our own traces upon it—sometimes even accidentally ripping off a book’s cover.
Years later, I find myself teaching in Museum Studies and I think about that damaged book frequently. While museums do allow staff, scholars, descendant communities, and others to access materials in their collections, the affective stagecraft of a museum is one of untouchability. Glass cases, stanchions, guards, cameras, and signs all manage our sensual interactions with materials on display justified through a rhetoric of protection, preservation, and permanency. In these spaces, I find myself craving the intimacy of the library.
This desired intimacy has led me to decay.
I bruise a peach when I squeeze it too hard, I wear out my favorite shoes by wearing them every day, I ripped a book because I was moving it. We bump up against the things in our world, the things we love and the things we care for, because we are embodied, living with them. In advocating for a decay-oriented approach to materiality and, indeed, museum collections, I advocate for an approach of living with the things around us even though this bruises them. Material things have lifespans that eschew immortality and wholeness. Things are mortal.
The presentation of death in museums is central to discussions of decolonization. It is bodies of Indigenous, Black, Disabled, and anonymous dead that rest displaced in the collections of natural history museums, art museums, genocide memorials, medical museums, and other places of holding. Returning bodies to graves, families, earth, and decay rejects the colonial practices of accumulation, objectification, and ownership. Allowing things to return, be used, be touched, and to decay participates in a decolonial relational approach to things, people, environment, and care. This is already seen in the NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) policies of repatriating funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. This should be expanded and encouraged.
I began teaching about death in museums at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. All of us were intimately surrounded by death; the affective untouchability of death in museums seemed all the more alien in light of the omnipresence of lived and embodied mortality. I enrolled in the University of Vermont’s Professional and Continuing Education End-of-Life Doula Program to learn about intimacy and care in death. The program brought together medical workers, religious professionals, yoga teachers, grandparents, artists, and archivists to reflect on death care.
Central to doula work is the idea of companioning. You are not there to advance your own specific ideas for end-of-life care—regardless of whether those be your own personally held religious, medical, moral, or relational values. You act as an advocate for the desires of the dying, amplifying their wishes to family, doctors, friends, caregivers, and communities. You are there to be with someone experiencing a life-changing process that is unfamiliar and sometimes scary, painful, confusing, comforting, and affirming. Death is messy, chaotic, and cascading. We often lose mobility, cognition, comfort, independence, and so much more in the progression of dying; death can be a relief and a conclusion to the durational experience of dying. Once, in class, an end-of-life doula shared that sometimes, despite all your best efforts, you will say the wrong thing but, she assured us, saying something is better than ignoring death, hiding from grief, or avoiding loss.
The care-filled act of companioning someone as they die is an expression of love, respect, kindness, and compassion. It is less about the singular moment of death than the progress of decay leading towards death. In the 1982 animated film The Last Unicorn, an immortal unicorn is magically transformed into a mortal human woman; in her confusion at the physical transition, she cries “I can feel this body dying all around me!”[1] We are all decaying; it is part of our mortality.
In museums, libraries, cemeteries, subways, and houses, everything is dying all around us. How can we be companions in this world and sit with the decay-time of all materiality? How can we turn toward a practice of being with decay rather than avoiding it, hiding from it, rejecting it, and forcing ethics of conservation, ownership, preservation, and untouchability on to it? I ripped the cover off a book by doing the wrong thing, but perhaps, I argue, it is better to do something with these rare things and let them live with us, companioning us, too, through the bruises, wearing out, and destruction that is an inalienable part of mortal life.
[1] The Last Unicorn, dir. Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass (Century City: ITC Films Inc., 1982).
Marisa Karyl Franz is a Clinical Assistant Professor in Museum Studies at New York University. Her research engages ideas of intimacy, loss, memory, and destruction within material studies and critical theory. She focuses on Eastern Europe, especially at the edges of what once were the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Her previous work has been published in Sibirica, Museum & Society, Apocalyptica, and The Life Cycle of Russian Things: From Fishguts to Fabergé 1600–present.
