Duty to the Dead: A Personal Aside

Young Man with a Skull by Frans Hals. A popular — or at least common — motif of memento mori in artwork.

I have student work to grade and yesterday was very full, so I’m going to make this another brief piece. If you must, read this as an overly personal explanation of why there’s no longer piece today on politics or aesthetics or game design, or whatever you very patient people keep coming back here for.

While my immediate family is fairly small – I grew up in a household of five, and since then it’s only expanded a little bit with various partners, nephews and a niece – my extended family is fairly large. I’m not going to get deep into the dynamics: they all deserve their privacy, and it’s outside of the remit of this website.

However, what yesterday was full of was a funeral – writing a piece today fell to me, and it still fills a fair amount of my consciousness. I’m going to be discussing it in fairly general terms.

We bid farewell to my uncle, who was a man difficult to get along with at times for a variety of reasons. He had mental health issues, and they grew more pronounced as his life went on, but he refused care related to them. To an extent, it makes sense: if you use your mind to assess itself, some problems become invisible. What looks to outsiders like madness feels like a piercing insight from inside.

I am reminded of VALIS, Phillip K. Dick’s book late in life – a science fictional autobiography, where Dick received knowledge fired into his brain by god (a billions-of-years-old satellite) in the form of a pink laser. At one point, it informs him that his son was dying of an unknown malady. The child had an inguinal hernia that would have killed him had he not received immediate intervention. When something like this VALIS-moment happens, I feel that something can be said to be happening: perhaps not a literal laser-of-knowledge from heaven, but something slips in under the threshold of consciousness, and the mind builds up a narrative to justify the knowledge.

My uncle never had a VALIS-moment. His delusions didn’t dovetail with the world in such a way. Sometimes you could have a reasonable conversation with him, but eventually he would slip back into his delusions, which grew more and more elaborate as time went on, building up a conspiratorial worldview that was very much locked into the culture of the early 1990s. I’ll put it simply: the only Phillip K. Dick connection was the use of the word “Replicant”.

The family tried to help him, but there’s only so much help you can give to someone who refuses it. After my grandparents passed – separately, some time apart – he started living out of motels in the area, moving around seemingly at random. They tried to do what they could – I had decided to wash my hands of him some time before that.

Possibly related to my refusal to acknowledge the brain as the sole component of human consciousness.

There are two reasons that I made this decision. First, when I was very young – about fifteen months old – he gave me a brain injury. I acknowledge that it was an accident, and I have recovered as best as one might conceivably be able (my coordination is...not great at times, and I occasionally have difficulty sequencing and paying attention,) but as a result, I don’t feel that care for this particular uncle was my responsibility.

This was further cemented by the last time I had an extended interaction with him. Some background: I received a fairly generous creative writing scholarship in college, and focused on it in graduate school, as well (it was an MA program, but the focus was there.) So it’s fair to say that I’ve dedicated a fair amount of my time (one could say my life) to learning to write well. This uncle had decided that he wanted to be a writer, but distrusted computers. For whatever reason, it was suggested to me that I could type them up for him: I acquiesced, and sat in a Starbucks with him as I dutifully typed this story into my laptop, while he muttered about how this short story was going to be his big ticket to Hollywood, it would get him on Johnny Carson (please note: this was early 2016, I think? Possibly late 2015. Johnny Carson retired from the Tonight Show in 1992 and died in 2005.) The story wasn’t good, and was wrapped up in the symbolism of his particular delusions, but I dutifully gave him the file and instructed him on how he might try to get it published (Edgar knows a lot more about that process than I do, actually having, you know, successfully published something.)

A week or so later, he called me up and claimed I had ruined him because someone stole his story. He could produce no evidence that such a thing had happened, but because it was connected to the internet, it had clearly been stolen. I told him that I intentionally put my stories up on the internet so that others could read them, and that they had never been stolen. He told me that hadn’t happened “because your work isn’t worth stealing.”

I laughed once, told him that we were done, and hung up on him.

The way I figured it, if it actually mattered, he could find his way out of the tangled forest paths of his own delusions and apologize to me. Perhaps someone else could help him – I’d gotten literal insult added to injury, so I was out.

But instead of navigating his way back out to something approximating lucidity, he passed away. We had a funeral for him and we still don’t really know why he died: the whole situation is just one giant loose end.

This has been a fairly long walk. Those of you still reading might be waiting for the spot where I get to the point. Much of this has been just me venting my spleen and working out where my head’s at. There are several general principles that I’m keeping in mind, though.

To explain the saying to those unfamiliar with it: the punchline of the extremely long joke is “the dog wasn’t that shaggy, anyway.” It refers to a long and involved situation that has no real resolution.

First, almost everyone’s life is going to be a bit of a shaggy dog story. Having a narrative arc to your life is a luxury that few people get to enjoy.

Second, reconciliation is special because not everyone gets to experience it for the things that have bothered them.

Finally, regardless of everything else, I feel that there is a generalized duty to mourn people’s passing, when you know them yourself and can stomach doing so. Regardless of your feelings toward those in your life, when one of them dies it is necessary to go through the motions. Perhaps there is something after death, perhaps there is nothing, but when confronted with the thought that no one might go through the motions after my own death, I feel a sorrow and loneliness that I don’t really know what to do with.

This has been a hard week, and I’m not certain that this piece will remain up forever. I assure you that next week we will have something more substantial for you.

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