What You Leave Behind Identifies You
A book review of ‘Personal Effects’ by Robert A. Jensen
Personal Effects by Robert A. Jensen details the process of recovering and identifying the dead after a natural, or manmade, disaster, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami, or the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings.
His company, Kenyon International Emergency Services, has been on the ground for almost every natural, or manmade, disaster you can think of, which is unbelievable. Reading this book was both insightful and somber; I had a lot of quiet, reflective moments after each chapter, just thinking about the emotional toll on the workers, as well as the surviving family, that these events evoke.
I also couldn’t help but wonder, “how could anyone be prepared to face these situations?” which Robert succinctly answers by stating, “What I’ve learned in life is that no one — businesses, governments, the media, even first responders or families — is ever quite prepared enough for these crises or disasters.” Yet he and his team repeatedly face these situations, forever changing their daily fears and lives in ways I cannot understand.
Personal effects, the things you carry with you, can define who you are in the moment or who you’ll be remembered as, as jarring as that realization was to me, it is painfully true. The things they find among the wreckage are “reminders of lives lived, the last glimpses of the people we knew, how they lived and how they died,” as the author put it.
Being among the dead is a reminder of human fragility and the uncertainty of each moment. Robert dwells on this in each chapter when retelling a story from his personal archives about a disaster he attended to because each event, to him, stands out with its life lessons and reminders. For example, when reflecting on what the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings taught him, he states, “Oklahoma City taught me an early and important lesson about sudden, large-scale catastrophes: Don’t expect wisdom at the moment of death” and “people are paralyzed in the face of mass death: it’s that place where we don’t allow our minds to go.”
I can’t believe that this is a job, a profession, that someone willing gets into, the recovering and identification of the dead, which feels different from being a first responder or a mortician because those professions are meant to either save a life or close a life in a dignified manner.
To me, it feels odd that there is an in between, but it makes sense because if you are a victim in a missing person’s case and no body has been recovered, you too are essentially in this limbo space. It just feels uncomfortable, to me at least, that anyone would be stuck in this phase because death should have a complete ending, instead of an unending sense of “what now? How can I move on?”
I was humbled by the work, hours, and manpower put in to identify victims of these terrible incidents, where something as small as a tooth can knock an unidentified person’s case wide open. I also learned about the tragic waiting and uncertainty that plagues the surviving family members; their need for closure can come in many forms, from an official declaring that their loved one is dead to actually holding onto an item found among the debris that signifies said loved one was there.
Overall, this book serves as a reminder of the arduous process that follows any tragic incident and that recovery is not always immediate or certain. If you are interested in reading this book yourself, you can find a copy here, but please, remember to check out your local library first.
