The wisest person I ever met would insist that he was not. My uncle Denny was a theologian and philosopher with three PhDs, a fact that would embarrass him to mention and that I only knew from reading his obituary. He wrote me letters by hand and postcards by typewriter, and though his friend Patrice eventually bought him a computer he lived all 89 of his years on this earth without the Internet. He was, as my cousin’s husband toasted the night of Denny’s funeral, “the smartest man who never made you feel stupid.” He cringed at praise, insisting that he was nothing special. He told me, the last time we had dinner, that while he thought many things, he knew nothing.
I am not being pretentious writing that, and neither was he. He spoke like a poet and a philosopher because he was one, he had nobody for whom to perform being a performative male.
After his funeral, his nephews and nieces gathered in his small apartment to perform the ancient midwestern ritual of Scavenging A Dead Person’s Belongings. I say Midwestern because my cousin’s son, a born New Yorker, trepidatiously placed a few mismatched pint glasses in a box and asked me if it was really okay to take them. Yes, I told him, Denny wouldn’t be using them anymore, and had he seen this 1970s windbreaker? It would look perfectly at home on the streets of Bushwick.
Denny died the best way I could imagine (and I imagine a lot of ways to die): in his reading chair, the Mississippi River outside his picture window. He left piles of books: philosophy, theology, foreign languages I didn’t know he spoke, a booklet on how to play the recorder from the 1950s and the recorder he must have had since then. He left short stories and essays of unknown origin in various forms of editing and with no apparent author. He left floppy disks, and rumors of an upcoming novel being published that nobody in the family seemed to know anything about.
I left with several pieces of Catholica (I cannot leave a statue of Mary behind!!!), his high school diploma and graduation announcement, and various books, some to keep and some to send to cousins who could not attend the funeral. I left with the ache that comes with knowing that you have had your last conversation, that you missed the opportunity to reply to that last letter.
I have thought of my uncle often since his death, glad that he is not here to see the state of this world and wanting him to reassure me in his quiet, humble way that we will get through it. I have revisited his letters -- decades of correspondence -- and tried (and failed, again) to read his most famous book.
This week, I published a conversation with the writer Charley Burlock about her piece in the Atlantic titled, The AI Companies Trying To Make Grief Obsolete. I have tried to fully process my thoughts on why this technology feels so wrong to me, so out of step with what makes us human. I have wondered what my philosopher uncle would say, and how many conversations it would take to fully explain the concept of a deadbot to a man who had never been on the Internet. Catholics believe in The Communion of Saints; that the dearly departed can pray for us as we pray for them, that we can ask them for guidance, for intercession. I have spoken with my dead husband through mediums and wind phones and out loud in my car while sobbing to a song he never got to hear by an artist he loved. I spent countless hours after his death scrolling through my phone, listening to old voicemails and looking at old photos.
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The technocrats -- who already illegally ingested his intellectual property for their gain -- would be delighted for me to feed what I have left of my uncle (or my father or my husband) into the algorithm, to grind up his unique and sparkling intellect to create grist for the AI slop mill. Or, as they would say, connect with his legacy in a meaningful way.
The surest way for me to meet a deadline (even a self-imposed one, like this piece) is to do anything but write: pull all of my clothes out of the closet, spend hours trying to figure out the real identity of the woman we called “Scary Mary” in 1990s South Minneapolis, call my uncle’s friend whom I met at his funeral luncheon to tell her that the algorithm had informed me that his novel was real and available for pre-order.
She was missing him in the same way, wanting to run her ideas by him as she had for decades, and while I had interrupted her afternoon with my unexpected call, we talked for 40-odd minutes until it was time for her to be a grandmother and time for me to sit back down and try to write.
In Charley’s piece, the founder of You, Only Virtual compares grief to gangrene, something you’d certainly be smart to avoid if you could. And while I’ve never lost a limb to rot, I have more than once found myself hobbling through this world as though I had. He didn’t just miss his mom, he missed who he was when she was alive: he missed being her son.
My uncle’s friend -- who, again, I have met exactly once, at his funeral lunch -- gave me both her afternoon and the conversation I wanted to have with him.
I wrote down her words the way I wrote down my uncles, and gave them a place of (dubious) honor on my computer monitor:
To reject suffering is to reject life.
That is why this technology sounds an alarm bell inside of me: because what makes life meaningful is the temporary nature of our temporal existence. The ache we feel for the ones we love is the evidence that they were real. It is not inherently meaningful, but it shows us the meaning and value of life. The pain is not the point, but without the pain…what is the point?
Is the point -- like with so many technologies that promise to optimize our lives -- to make us more efficient for the sake of efficiency? To buff away all of the texture of life?
You are not who you were before loss, and you aren’t supposed to be. We are changed in large and in imperceptible ways by the people we love and by the ways they love us. My children sing the songs my grandfather taught me, a small piece of a man they never met that they might hand down to their kids. I have my uncle’s letters and lessons, his humble example of how to live, which I will never live up to because I am terribly vain and often annoying.
We are always in conversation: with the world, with our lives, and yes, with the dead. And we don’t need an algorithm to do it.
ICYMI: Talking about my Grandma with Kelly Corrigan | Kelly Corrigan on IGTBO! | The Dead Sibling Society | Wind Phone Part 3 | My THC/CBD guide | How to listen to the podcast on your podcast app!
Yours in earnestness and imperfection,
Nora
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Come see me!
Attn female funeral directors (truly a dream demographic of mine)...I’ll be hanging out with you on May 8!
You can join me for a Bad Vibes Only book club with the Society of Working Moms on June 14th!
I looooove speaking about mental health, grief and other hilarious topics. You can email bkane@apbspeakers.org if you want to bring me to your event or organization.