THE archaeologist Sarah Tarlow’s memoir of losing her husband Mark to an undiagnosed neurological condition in 2016 raises profoundly uncomfortable questions. Is suicide prevention always the right course? Is it acceptable for a partner, especially a woman, faced with a loved one’s disabling and deteriorating health, to rail against the role of full-time carer, in favour of career, children, and supporting frail parents? Is practical household support of more comfort to the bereaved than counselling?
In The Archaeology of Loss, Tarlow makes compelling arguments for these stances, interwoven with the story of her 16-year relationship with Mark, their family life with three children, Rachel, Greg, and Adam, and her work researching the archaeology of death and burial. From her early Ph.D. years on Orkney, Tarlow is interested in the emotional meaning of burial practices rather than the prevailing lens of power relations and economic status.
Charting the author and Mark’s relationship from their first meeting at a Lampeter University job interview, where he got the post, and she was recruited months later, the memoir captures their departmental flirtation, and then sealing the deal at a housewarming party. Later, they teach at Leicester University, where Mark takes voluntary redundancy in preparation for their shared, less academia-centric future.
“This is what we thought would happen next: A big cheap, old house in Lincolnshire, with an outbuilding where Mark would make salami. I would be working from home at least half the week. . . We would take holidays in term time, sit in a café in Vienna. . . At the correct time, many years from now, we would be healthy grandparents. But that is not the future we got.”
In 2011, Tarlow and her husband were looking in a Grantham estate agent’s window when Mark felt as if he were about to pass out. A prescription for anti-seizure drugs allowed life to continue as normal for a while. But an MRI scan six months later indicated that brain damage could be causing the seizures rather than the other way round. The brain damage’s cause was unknown.
“Right until the end, all his treatments, his symptoms, his hospital visits, his changing capacities, were plotless. There was no clear narrative to Mark’s illness. . . I could not produce the kind of tale that our friends and relatives wanted to be told — too much was unknown, there were too few fixed points. We did not know what kind of story we were in.”
Early on, Tarlow alludes to the literary challenges of writing a memoir with fuzzy parameters. “How can I find Mark or our relationship, our years as a family, in just a mood or a feeling, like the hangover from a dream? I wish my memory was better, and then I worry this might be the onset of dementia. Not a promising start for a memoir.”
Sarah Tarlow, Professor of Historical Archaeology at the University of Leicester
Her structural solution is to begin most chapters with archaeological revelations: pagans displacing Christian graves on the Isle of Man, or a 4000-year-old paraplegic skeleton in Vietnam evidencing community care, and the Inca practice of capacocha: child sacrifice. She is insightful about the way in which 17th-century burial customs in England became more elaborate, exactly as the Church diminished the importance of the dead body in comparison with that of the soul.
St Richard of the Car Park is the most compelling fusion of archaeology and the personal. Leicester’s Greyfriars chapel as possible burial site for Richard III had long been used by the university as a sweetener for archaeological grants, but the discovery of his remains was unexpected. Tarlow wittily outlines the university’s struggles to keep control of the king-in-the-car-park story, unearthed in summer 2012, but made public only the following year, against the publicity hungry Richard III Society, “a clutch of free-range eggs if ever there was one”.
In 2015, Tarlow’s family attended a service to mark the departure of the king’s remains from the university, to be reinterred. Mark was still able to walk, but could not stand for long, leaning against a wall so that former colleagues could not see how ill he was. “We stood patiently and sombrely through a load of dutifully multifaith readings and some lugubrious funerary theatre, as a couple of dozen team members laid white roses on a velvet cushion.”
Declaring the cathedral ceremony four days later “pompous mummery”, she contrasts the reverence for the long dead with the indifference shown to the thousands whose loved ones go missing every year.
As we know from the beginning, 14 months afterwards, Mark would be dead, having taken his own life while the family visited Tarlow’s brother. For Tarlow, her husband of two weeks was forced to die alone and deprived of saying a proper goodbye to friends and family because of — sometimes faith-driven — resistance to assisted suicide for incurable pain. “What we should not respect, however, is anyone’s right to make a decision for somebody else on the basis of unevidenced and unshared spiritual beliefs.”
Tarlow is an acerbic and original writer at her best when dissecting modern orthodoxy — from the “tyranny of best practice” in university teaching, to job-recruitment dinners as “trial by vol-au-vent” and the absurdity of medical quality-of-life definitions, QALYs (quality-adjusted life years) privileging length-of-life “breathing” over meaningful life
Her caustic dismissal of well-wishers who arrived at “paralysed, incontinent” Mark’s sickbed with vitamin B, or suggesting books on the brain’s plasticity, will resonate with all exhausted care-givers. As a humanist funeral celebrant, Tarlow is “not religious, not even spiritual”, but, in the dark final months, she offered up wishes. “When I made my wishes, who was I talking to?”
Susan Gray writes about the arts and entertainment for The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, and the Daily Mail.
The Archaeology of Loss by Sarah Tarlow is published by Picador at £10.99 (Church Times Bookshop £9.89); 978-1-5290-9955-3.
Listen to the author Sarah Tarlow in conversation with Sarah Meyrick in this week’s Church Times podcast. This is a monthly series produced in association with the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature. Listen here.
THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LOSS— SOME QUESTIONS
- Tarlow’s character is revealed through her reaction to events and others. Does this compensate for scant autobiographical information?
- “Show, don’t tell” is standard writing advice. Is this memoir more effective with reconstructed scenes or with analysis?
- How do Mark’s hair-clippers set the tone for the exploration of their relationship?
- Are people bereaved by suicide still treated differently, or less sympathetically than those who have lost loved ones in other ways?
- Do the archaeological stories feel illuminating?
- Tarlow questions the worth of medical aids at home and round-the-clock care-giving, when there is no prospect of recovery or fuller life. Is this justified?
IN OUR next Book Club on 4 October, we will print extra information about our next book, The Bell by Iris Murdoch. It is published by Vintage Classics at £10.99 (£9.89); 978-0-09-947048-9).
THE BOOK

Published in 1958, Irish Murdoch’s modern classic The Bell is hailed as a great work of philosophical and psychological fiction. Murdoch succeeds in creating a narrative that contains both intellectual depth and the lighter elements of social comedy. The story centres on a group of characters, all with complex problems, who seek refuge in a lay religious community in rural Gloucestershire. The emerging philosophical and religious arguments within the group are compelling, and the author is skilled at drawing out the conundrums of each of the characters. Their community sits alongside a medieval abbey inhabited by Benedictine nuns. As the two neighbouring communities await the arrival of a new replacement bell for the medieval bell tower, the story takes an unexpected turn when the missing bell is found and retrieved from the lake near by.
THE AUTHOR
Iris Murdoch (1919-99) was both an acclaimed philosopher and novelist. Born in Ireland, she was brought up in Chiswick, in west London, by her Irish parents. In 1938, she went up to Somerville College, Oxford, to study classics, ancient history, and philosophy, and in 1948 became a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she taught philosophy until 1963. Her best-known book on philosophy is The Sovereignty of Good (1970) . As a novelist, she wrote many award-winning books, including The Sea, The Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 1978. She was appointed a Dame in 1987, and was described by The Times in the 1990s as “the greatest living novelist in English”.