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Your late mother’s diary: is reading it remembrance or trespass?

The Editors Contributor
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DeathGreek & RomanModern EuropeanAristotle#diaries#grief#privacy#wronging-the-dead
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Its coordinates: 6.20 Philosophy of Death

After a parent dies, someone has to clear the drawers. Sometimes one of them holds a diary.

Suppose she never asked for it to be burned, and never said you could read it. It may explain things you always wondered about. It may also contain things she chose, for decades, not to tell you.

  • Can the dead be wronged at all? If privacy protects a person, and the person is gone, what is left to protect?
  • Does it matter whether you read it to understand her, or to settle an old argument?
  • Is reading it yourself different from passing it round the family?

The most famous case runs the other way. Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn his papers, diaries included, unread. Brod refused and published them. Most readers are glad he did. Should they be?

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2 answers

  1. Dilnoza Karimova

    Contributor

    When my father-in-law died we found two notebooks. My husband read them alone, at night, and then tore out a few pages and burned them. He never told anyone what was on them.

    I think he did right. He read to understand his father, and then he protected his father from the rest of us. Reading is not the trespass. Showing is.

  2. Aoife Kilbride

    Fellow

    Aristotle takes the first question more seriously than you might expect. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, chapters 10 and 11, he asks whether what happens to a person's children and friends after death can affect how that person fared. He concludes that it does make some difference, but too small a one to turn a happy life into an unhappy one.

    If he is right that the dead can be touched at all, then a diary is a strange case: the harm would be to how she is seen, which is the one part of her that is still here, among the people who loved her. That makes Dilnoza's distinction between reading and showing look very sound to me.