My Mother’s Body

Following a dinner party in 1986, Louise Bokkenheuser’s mother, Annelise, fell to her death in the stairwell of her building in Copenhagen. Decades later, Bokkenheuser returns to her birthplace to obtain a copy of her mother’s file: a police report “full of contradictions and mistakes,” along with ” letter from “the autopsy results, a letter from my father, and a note about my grandmother.” A keen, personal consideration of journalistic practice, official narratives, and their limits.

A friend once told me that we go to the archives hoping the dead will speak to us, and it occurred to me that if I could find some documentation that told the story of her death, it would cancel the empty decades between us and allow me to spend time with her again. Perhaps I could approach her death as I approached any story: Find the indisputable facts. I started by emailing the Copenhagen Police and was told the report related to my mother’s death had in fact been transferred to the national archives, and so I wrote an official request for the file and was told it might take some time to process. (The national archives, or Rigsarkivet, which describes itself as “Denmark’s memory,” holds documents from the twelfth century on: parish registers, divorce and probate court records, police reports, death certificates, and handwritten documents in Gothic script, among them. Denmark is a small country with deep shelves.)