ESSAY 

Staying With the Question:  

On patience, uncertainty, and the discipline of not knowing

August 22, 2026

On Friday afternoon of August 21, 2026, an email arrived in my inbox that I had stopped expecting.

The subject line gave me no immediate reason to remember it: “Re: New submission from Contact Us.” But the sender did:  “Research Inquiries, Chicago History Museum.”

I had written to the museum nearly six months earlier, on February 26, while trying to track down a television broadcast my father remembered appearing in as a child. According to a Chicago Tribune article I found during my research, WGN-TV aired a program called How Can I Help My Child to Read on July 19, 1955. My father had told me several times over the course of several conversations that his first-grade teacher, Maud C. Stubbings, appeared on the program with several of her students, including him.

I had already followed that trail as far as I thought I could.  My search produced evidence that the broadcast had happened, but not the footage that would correlate my father’s remembrance.  WGN could not locate a record of it. I contacted the Chicago History Museum, which holds a collection of WGN newsfilm, and heard nothing back. By April, I had written about the experience in an essay, When the Record Complicates Memory, reflecting on what happens when family memory and the documentary record don't quite meet.

Then I moved on, not because I had decided the footage didn't exist. I simply had nowhere else to go with the question.

And then, nearly six months after I sent my inquiry, the museum answered.  The answer wasn't yes.  It wasn't no, either.  In fact, the email revealed that the answer to the question I thought I had reached a dead end was considerably more complicated than I knew.

****

The Chicago History Museum couldn't tell me whether the footage exists.  What it could tell me was why answering that question is so difficult.

The WGN newsfilm collection has not been digitized or catalogued by the museum. Instead, the Abakanowicz Research Center has a card index that accompanied the collection when it was donated. Organized by personal name or subject, the cards may include a clip date, running time, whether sound exists, a clip number and a brief description.  Researchers can consult the index in person or hire someone to search it on their behalf. Once potentially relevant clips are identified, the process becomes considerably more complicated. The films themselves are stored offsite. Under normal circumstances, museum staff make retrieval trips only two or three times a year because of the distance to the storage facility and the number of staff members required. If the requested reels can be located, they are brought onsite and eventually sent to a third-party vendor for digitization.

But these aren't normal circumstances.

The WGN collection recently became unavailable for retrieval altogether, with no current timeline for when access will resume.  Suddenly, the absence I had encountered months earlier looked different.  I had searched for evidence of my father's appearance and failed to find it. WGN had been unable to locate a record. My inquiry to the museum had gone unanswered for months. From where I stood as a researcher, the trail appeared to have ended.  But what if I hadn't reached the end of the record?  Instead, what if I had simply reached the limits of access to it?  That distinction matters.

A record can exist without being digitized. It can be preserved without being readily accessible. It can sit safely in storage while remaining effectively invisible to the researcher trying to find it. A finding aid can exist without being searchable online. And an institution can hold a collection while temporarily lacking the ability to retrieve the materials within it.  None of this, however, means the footage of my father survives...It means I still don't know.

And six months after beginning this particular search, I was discovering that I don't know was not a failure of the inquiry. It was simply the most methodologically honest answer the evidence allowed me to give.

****

The museum's response made me reconsider something I had taken for granted throughout this search: what exactly does “no” mean?

When a researcher asks whether something exists and is told that no record can be found, it is tempting to treat that response as a conclusion. We asked. We searched. The answer was no. Close the file.  But “no record found” and “no record exists” are not necessarily the same thing.

A record might not be catalogued. It might not be digitized. It might be described under a name or subject the researcher hasn't considered. It might be preserved but inaccessible. It might exist in a collection whose finding aid is available only onsite. It might be sitting in offsite storage waiting for someone with the time, staffing and resources to retrieve it.  And, of course, it might genuinely no longer exist.  The challenge is resisting the urge to decide which explanation is true before the evidence allows us to do so.

That realization has particular significance for the questions I've been asking about archival absence. It can be tempting to encounter a gap in the record and immediately begin explaining why the gap exists. Race, gender, class and other structures of power have unquestionably shaped what has been documented, collected, preserved, described and made accessible. Those histories matter.  But knowing that those forces operate within archives does not mean they explain every absence we encounter.

Sometimes the problem may be preservation. Sometimes it may be description. Sometimes access. Sometimes institutional capacity. Sometimes technology. Sometimes the record may never have been created in the first place. And sometimes several of these conditions may be operating at once.

The task, then, isn't simply to notice an absence and assign meaning to it.

It is to ask a more difficult question:  What kind of absence am I actually looking at?  I don't yet know the answer in my father's case.  What I am learning is that I don't have to rush to provide one.

****

For nearly six months, I wasn't waiting for the Chicago History Museum to respond.  I had made the inquiry. I had followed the leads available to me. I had documented what I found and written about what the experience taught me. Then I turned my attention elsewhere.  What I hadn't done was declare the question settled, and in my mind, there is a difference, a huge one.

I am beginning to understand that an unanswered question does not have to remain an open task. I can put an inquiry down without deciding that I will never learn anything more. I can proceed with the information available to me without turning a provisional conclusion into a permanent one.  That requires a kind of patience I haven't always recognized in myself.

I tend to think of patience as waiting: remaining still while something unresolved takes however long it takes to work itself out. By that definition, I am not particularly good at it. I like movement. I like answers. Once a question captures my attention, my instinct is to follow it until I understand what I'm looking at.  But research is teaching me that patience doesn't always require waiting in place.  Sometimes patience means doing what can be done, acknowledging what cannot be known yet, and continuing with the rest of the work.

Had I spent the past six months repeatedly contacting the museum, searching the same databases or trying to force an answer from the same limited evidence, I would not have made the collection more accessible. I would simply have spent six months demanding resolution from a question that could not yet give it to me.  Instead, the question sat quietly while I continued working.  And when new information finally arrived, I was able to reopen it.

Perhaps that is the discipline I am learning: how to keep a question open without keeping myself suspended.

****

Not long ago, during one of our conversations, my father mentioned almost in passing that patience wasn't one of his strengths.  I didn't say anything, but I made a mental note.  Thinking back on that moment, I understood exactly what he meant because I recognize the same tendency in myself. Neither of us particularly enjoys waiting. We like movement. We like resolution. Give us a problem and we'd rather figure out what to do about it than sit around indefinitely wondering what happens next.  But the more I thought about my father's comment, the less convinced I was that his description of himself was complete.  

This is a man who worked for the same company for twenty-five years. He has technically remained married to my mother for fifty-four years, though they have been physically separated since 1994. And now, decades later, he has spent countless hours talking with me as I slowly reconstruct portions of his life, returning to memories and events whose meaning sometimes becomes clearer only after we revisit them.  His aren’t merely stories about waiting around for something to happen:  They're stories about staying with something that he cared about, despite his complicated feelings about that very thing.  

Perhaps patience isn't his weakness:  Perhaps he simply doesn't like waiting.   And perhaps I have been making the same mistake in how I understand myself.

There is a difference between being temperamentally impatient and being behaviorally incapable of waiting. A person can dislike uncertainty, want things to move faster, and still possess an extraordinary capacity to remain committed to something over time.  Maybe my father and I have both been underselling that capacity in ourselves.  Maybe what I inherited from him wasn't simply impatience.  Maybe I inherited the ability to stay, too.

What a blessing.

****

The more I sit with this experience, the more I wonder whether patience belongs not only among the personal qualities I bring to my research, but among the practices that shape how I conduct it.  Research asks us to make judgments. But it also asks us to know when we don't yet have enough information to make them.  That distinction has become increasingly important to me as I think about archival absence.

I bring my own experiences, beliefs and ways of understanding the world into every archive I encounter. I don't believe researchers become objective simply by pretending those things aren't there. Race, gender, class and power are among the lenses through which I understand institutions and the records they produce and preserve.  But a lens is not a verdict.  If I encounter an absence in an archive, my awareness of structural inequality may help me recognize questions worth asking. It should not predetermine the answers.

The WGN collection is reminding me why.

Months ago, I could have looked at the difficulty of finding evidence of a Black child appearing on Chicago television in 1955 and constructed an explanation around racialized archival erasure. It might even have sounded persuasive.  But I didn't have the evidence to make that claim.

Now I know considerably more about the collection than I did in April. I know about the card index. I know the collection hasn't been digitized or catalogued by the museum. I know the films are stored offsite. I know retrieval requires considerable coordination. And I know that, for reasons I do not yet understand, the collection is currently unavailable.

That additional knowledge hasn't answered my original question, but it has made me more careful about the questions I ask. For example, what kind of absence am I looking at? At what point was it produced? Is this a problem of representation, preservation, description, discovery or access? Could it be about resources or station priorities?  Are several things happening at once? What evidence would I need before I could responsibly say?  And what if the evidence I need isn't available yet?  Perhaps patience enters the methodology precisely there.  It is the discipline of allowing a question to remain unresolved rather than filling the space with the explanation I find most familiar, compelling or ideologically satisfying. It is the willingness to let evidence complicate what I already believe. And it is the willingness to revise my understanding when something I couldn't have anticipated arrives six months later in my inbox.

Sometimes the most rigorous conclusion available to a researcher is not yes or no.  Sometimes it is simply:  I don't know yet.

****

I began this search because my father asked me to find something.  He remembered appearing on television as a little boy, sitting alongside his classmates while his teacher demonstrated how she taught children to read. I wanted to see what he remembered. I wanted to find the footage, show it to him and perhaps recover one small piece of his childhood.  I still want that.

But somewhere along the way, the search itself began teaching me something I hadn't expected.  I am learning how to follow a question seriously without demanding that it answer me on my timetable. I am learning how to distinguish what I know from what I suspect, and what I suspect from what I can demonstrate. I am learning that I can hold strong beliefs about the world while remaining willing to discover that the evidence points somewhere I didn't anticipate.   Most of all, I am learning that uncertainty does not have to become an emergency.

There are already new questions I could ask based on what the Chicago History Museum told me. At some point, I may pursue them.  But I don't have to pursue them today.  Somewhere in Chicago, there may be a card in an index that points toward the broadcast my father remembers. Somewhere in offsite storage, there may be a reel corresponding to that card. The reel may survive. It may not. And even if it does, I don't know when I will have the opportunity to see it.

Six months ago, that uncertainty felt like a problem I needed to solve.  Today, it feels different.

The question is still open.  And I am comfortable leaving it that way, until the archive decides to speak again.