Abstract
In this article, I offer my personal narrative as an artist in residence caring for a family experiencing the loss of their child in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Specifically, I illustrate with words, images, and word-images the process of creating memory objects during the end-of-life care of a neonate[1]. In curating this narrative, I am influenced by the practice of creating visual testimonios[2] and as a methodology for theorizing through lived experience with image and text. Visual testimonios are an embodied feminist methodology of telling one’s own layered, sometimes divergent, narratives through the available structures of word processors. It plays with the confines of the academic paper format and seeks to expand meaning with the (mis)use and juxtaposition of text and space. My use of both text, image, and word-image works similarly in this regard, to highlight divides and confusion of the seemingly straightforward medical model of healthcare with the affective entanglement occurring between materials, bodies, and constructions of memory[3]. I highlight moments of the sociomaterial to draw out the affective material relations occurring with caregivers during end-of-life care.
[1] Rebecca Thornton, Patricia Nicholson, and Louise Harms, “Scoping Review of Memory Making in Bereavement Care for Parents After the Death of a Newborn,” Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic & Neonatal Nursing 48, no. 3 (May 2019): 351–60, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jogn.2019.02.001.
[2] Christen Sperry García et al., “Visual Testimonios,” in BIPOC Alliances: Building Communities and Curricula (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2023), 25–35.
[3] Emanuele Prezioso and Nicolás Alessandroni, “Enacting Memories through and with Things: Remembering as Material Engagement,” Memory Studies 16, no. 4 (August 2023): 962–83, https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980221108475.
Recommended Citation
Tyler, Courtney M.
(2025)
"Affective material-memories: a caregiver’s experience with memory making in end-of-life care of neonates,"
Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine: Vol. 10:
Iss.
2, Article 5.
Available at:
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/survive_thrive/vol10/iss2/5