Love in the Archives: Living with profound grief

Love in the Archives
by Eileen Vorbach Collins
Baltimore, MD: Apprentice House
Nov. 7 2023
Posted to Amazon

It seems crass to say I enjoyed this memoir-in-essays, given that it’s about how Eileen Vorbach Collins finds her way back into — and keeps herself in — the land of the living following her daughter Lydia’s death by suicide. But I did, and there is much to appreciate: the award-winning writing; the unvarnished truth about the bone-deep grief she continues to feel; and the grounding of her experience in the everyday.

Vorbach Collins’ essays make clear that being present to the quotidian — mothering her younger son, Daniel; returning to work; finding her way into support groups; continuing to breathe even while screaming her anguish at unexpected moments — is the challenge after her cataclysmic loss.

Vorbach Collins uses writing as a way to process her grief and her experience of living with that grief, still, more than twenty years after the death of her daughter. I am grateful she persevered through the challenges to produce this powerful book. It holds lessons and wisdom for anyone who has loved and lost a loved one to suicide, and for everyone who knows someone who has.

I will add that I have not been able to read Love in the Archives in one stretch; I have dipped into it over several months since purchasing it. I read an essay, I savour the words, I imagine feeling those same emotions, and I wonder at the strength of this woman who acknowledges and honours her grief — and keeps breathing, keeps living. I feel cowardly that I am able to close the cover and set it aside, to come back to it when I am ready for more. But maybe this is not that different from Vorbach Collins’ own approach to life in this world without Lydia — one day, one story, one year at a time: “That’s how I do it,” she writes. “…each [year] different, each one filled with longing and sadness, with new friends and old ones. Each year [brings] tears but also laughter.” Over time, as her essays show, she is able to allow others into her space, into her life, and to also make room for laughter.

While there will never come a time that she will be “over it”, Vorbach Collins’ moving and meaningful memoir shows that one way to carry such loss is to write about it. And this reader is grateful for that.