Volume IX

Death and Return

Filed twice: once for leaving, once for coming back.

Mourning photography, memorial prints, resurrection iconography, and the medical literature of apparent death, from the period during which physicians were genuinely uncertain how to tell. Volume IX is the most formal volume in the archive and the least decorated. The Entities here are recovered from records that exist because somebody was gone.

Records 0809 to 0909. Handled with the restraint these sources deserve: no record in this volume attaches a fictional identity to a real named decedent.