Shared Relations: Trauma and Kinship in the Afterlife of Death

Abstract

Since 2013, we have studied the logic and narratives of an environmental epigenetics research team that studies the correlations between early childhood adversity (ECA), specific biomarkers, and suicide risk. Within this research program, kin of the deceased participate in psychological autopsies, which researchers use to establish to classify the deceased within a typology of suicide with or without abuse. We focus on the words of these family respondents and their reflections on the life and death of their loved ones, and life after that death, to consider the slippery, transgressive, and relational character of trauma and its effects. Studies of the residues of past experiences provide crucial insights into the complex, unpredictable, and unsettled nature of kin relations. These relations are based in entwined biographies of the living and the dead and illustrate the holds that people have on each other and destabilize biomedical models of individualized trajectories of suicide risk. [suicide, psychological autopsies, trauma, care, kinship]

Homeorhesis: envisaging the logic of life trajectories in molecular research on trauma and its effects

“…These discrete findings reflect only one among innumerable molecular processes that might be related to the behavioural outcomes potentially associated with the experience of trauma (Barnett Burns et al, 2018). Moreover, MGSS researchers' analyses are based on limited snapshots of the final moment of people's lives and recollections of different moments of their life trajectories gathered in interviews with the kin of the deceased (Lloyd and Larivée, 2021). Thus, the current challenge for MGSS researchers is to interpret how empirical data intersect, or not, with existing theory.…”

“…This permits understandings of lives grounded in beliefs about homeostasis and homeorhesisat the level of molecular and phenotypic traitsin which singular life events are thought to indelibly shape lives. This mode of thinking has led to limited consideration of the uncertainty about the stability of epigenetic traitsin other words, about whether the apparently stable and supposedly rapid effects of early trauma are in fact the result of this singular experience or the progressive and "slow" result of repeated negative life experiences, which often characterize the life trajectories of many people affected by ELA (see Lloyd and Larivée, 2021).…”

“…Parallel studies at the MGSS, led by psychologists in collaboration with neuroepigenetics researchers, document the cumulative effects of negative life experiences that often precede suicide (Séguin et al, 2011). Thus, while the presence or absence of severe early abuse is of greatest interest to MGSS researchers, additional information gleaned about people's lives often documents lifelong experiences of mental health difficulties, addiction, socioeconomic and professional challenges, and personal loss (Séguin et al, 2013; see also Lloyd and Larivée, 2021).…”

Can you remember silence? Epigenetic memory and reversibility as a site of intervention

“…As we have argued elsewhere, the lives of people who experience early adversity are often characterized by ongoing challenges. [ 37 ] These may be in part related to the effects of early trauma, but may also be inscribed in pathological environments and what have been described as “slow” forms of violence. [ 11 ] These processual understandings of trauma and its effects still situate people's present difficulties at the intersection of memories and ongoing circumstances, but do not presume the primacy of memories.…”

“…Moreover, a fixation on apparently indelible memories does little to recognize and alleviate potentially ongoing trauma, that is as much an experience of the present as of the past. [ 37,41 ]…”