Shared Relations: Trauma and Kinship in the Afterlife of Death

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].