A Flock of Eulogies

Into my late twenties, I had what I felt to be unusually good fortune in not having had any significant experiences of bereavement. My extended family was intact, all my friends survived high school, and we didn't really have pets growing up (excepting a couple of goldfish that we never got around to naming, that my mother accidentally killed; and an adorable Chinese Crested that my brothers and I were quite taken with for about a month, but similarly failed to imprint with, and ended up selling to an elderly lady after less than a year).

This may have been largely a function of growing up in a fairly sheltered environment, where ready access to resources that would mediate threats of illness or injury were the norm for my family and most people I knew. Additionally, both sides of my family seem to carry whatever genes promote longevity, with several great-grandparents and grandparents having lived or currently living into their late eighties and early nineties, along with a minimal history of cancer, heart disease, or other hereditary health problems. That and I think a bit of good luck kept me from having to go to really any funerals until I was 29 or so. Year of my Saturn return, of course.

That was 2016. Collectively, we witnessed a freakish number of celebrity deaths that year. David Bowie, Carrie Fisher, Leonard Cohen, Alan Rickman, George Michael - many of these were stunning, in the sense of losing a known quantity, but if we're honest with ourselves the emotional impact of these losses was probably pretty minimal for most of us. Bowie's passing hit me pretty hard, but still - I can safely say that anyone reading this probably didn't know any of those figures personally, and neither did I. They were living canvases for us to project our feelings onto, at a comforting remove and asking nothing in return except our audience. For me, losing Bowie was losing a constant, was like watching a star go dark. It wasn't losing a history - I never met the man, never sat down with him at a coffee shop to exchange ideas, never collaborated with him on a project or argued with him or made a toast at his wedding. It was nothing personal.

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That was also the year I lost two of my grandparents: my father's father in January, and my mother's mother in June. These, of course, made an impact, although both had lived into their eighties. My grandfather had had a series of strokes and debilitating accidents for about a decade leading up to then; my grandmother's decline was more sudden.

Prior to this, I'd been somewhat self-conscious about having lived a life practically untouched by death. I'd concocted metaphysical theories about this: Death, to whom I'd ascribed personhood and agency, had a plan for me, or had devised in terms of my life's progression some sort of Faustian bargaining principle in which I'd had no foreknowledge or say. Up to a certain age, the theory went, I wouldn't touch death, would be protected from it; then the floodgates would open, and with the first death would come many; I would be in the weeds with it.

Of course, I had merely chosen to see a world without death, simply because it hadn't yet taken someone within my own friend/family network such that I would consider it to have "counted." Also at play here, however, was a species of wishful thinking: I desired some kind of antidote to an overly-sanitized upbringing by touching, making contact with, the abject element. To this day, at work or at home, I tend to be the one to volunteer to dispose of dead animals - rodents, lizards and the like.

When I was living in Portland, Oregon, a housemate's cat once dragged the body of a field mouse it had killed into our common area. I made a casket for it from a shoebox, lined it with newspaper and filled it with various ritual trinkets that would accompany it into the underworld, walked with it solemnly in funeral procession to the Willamette River and then released it into the current. This surely constituted a minor public health hazard, but I was twenty-three, idealistic and leading kind of a degenerate existence; I couldn't have cared less.

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Since my grandparents' passing, death hasn't asserted itself in my life as the deluge that I feared and perhaps morbidly hoped it would, and I'm grateful for this. I don't see myself dealing with personal loss stoically and with equanimity, like some kind of midwife for the other side. In some measure, I put that up as a front - to this day, even - and behind that I grieve. Deeply, abjectly - there is a fragility about me, around matters of life and the loss of it, that I don't like to let others see. 

I wrote this piece with two people in mind, a couple of unconnected individuals in my life whose deaths I received word of within 24 hours of each other.

The first passed away at the age of 79 of heart disease last September, and I didn't find out until a couple of nights ago. He was a beloved anthropology professor at UVA, and a spiritual guide to me and to many in his orbit; I was fortunate to see him fairly recently before his death, apparently healthy and in good spirits. I considered him a friend, and I like to believe he thought of me as one too.

This past May, willfully avoiding doing a Google search to find out whether he was still living, I posted some reflections on him to my Facebook page, which I reproduce here: 

I once had an anthropology professor who had authored an interesting methodology for deconstructing myth. He would break down a story, poem, etc. into six critical junctures and state these in terms of their archetype - as in the hero’s journey, for instance, the point of departure, the descent into the underworld, the return, and so forth. He laid these out circularly, such that the end recapitulated and thus implied the beginning again, so as basically to create a narrative circuit. 

Then, he reversed the flow of causality in this underlying archetypal structure, such that the denouement became the inciting event to the critical junctures that preceded it. As an exercise, he would invent a respecified telling of the myth in which events proceed according to this reversed archetypal progression. He positioned this as an “undoing” of the original mythic structure (in much the sense that Christopher Hyatt, for instance, used the term). He called this technique “obviation." 

Rereading an obviated myth was a revelation. Understanding it in terms of its “antitwin” (a term this professor invented) rendered the specific architecture of the narrative moot or irrelevant in such a way that the essence, or motive core, of the story was laid bare. I don’t know how else to describe it. I tried the technique on “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats, which was a poem I had already known by heart, and it changed the way the reading of the poem *felt* afterward. 

This same professor is in his eighties, and as of last year was still teaching a course for undergraduates each spring in which they read through all nine books in the main Carlos Castaneda series. He taught me a lot and helped set me on the path I’m on, and I miss him. 

This pretty much speaks for my feelings on hearing of his passing. I think on some level, despite keeping myself from confirming my intuition at the time that I wrote those reflections, a part of me already knew my professor was gone.

The second person I wanted specifically to write about in this post was about my age, also beloved in his community, and ended his life a couple of nights ago. I didn't know him well - we met while modeling together in a photo shoot for a vodka ad, shortly after I moved to Richmond three years ago - but I'd encounter him in cafes and grocery stores around town every now and then. We would trade snippets of conversation - I vividly remember a brief discussion we had about automation and its implications for the labor market in line for the self-checkout kiosks at Kroger - and even though he was practically a celebrity in the community, featuring in magazine articles and gallery exhibitions, he always seemed happy to see me, always made me feel like I mattered.

I suppose that's a characteristic of people who play those roles in the lives of others - they just generate that much love and good feeling around them, they lift others up like a gentle rising tide. I haven't found it within myself to be that for others; I am in awe of, and stand humbled before, those who are.