I think the thing I’ve been most surprised by is how much more open I am to religious themes of rebirth or an afterlife. I wasn’t really expecting that. It’s the thing I’ve noticed the most in the year since Andrew died. Though I guess really I’ve become superstitious in all sorts of ways. For example, writing out the bi-gram ‘Andrew died’ — I’d avoided tying his name to his death until now, just because…I don’t know, really. I didn’t name him the first time around.
What I mean to say is that I kinda get religion now, in a way that I hadn’t before. I’m mostly a scientist and I mostly am pretty privileged, so I’ve never really had to grapple with things that I felt were totally out of my understanding and I’ve had a strong inclination to want to find ‘the truth of the matter’, whatever that may be.
But death is a bit different. It turns out it’s quite easy to start believing in heaven when you suddenly have very strong reasons to want it to be true. By way of example, a bit after I found out Andrew had passed, I dreamt about him. I don’t really remember the dream now, but I vividly remember how I felt coming out of it — that Andrew had come to me in my dream as a sort of last goodbye moment. That I was somehow talking to a version of him, instead of it just being in my head. I woke up with a warm glow in my chest and a lot of conviction that he’d stopped by. Maybe it was true. Though even if souls did exist, why would he show up only after I found out about his passing? Instead of, like, two months earlier when he actually passed? It’s interesting to viscerally feel how far downstream belief is of want, in a way that I suspect most of us never really realize.
Mia and I think of him regularly. There’s a lot of things that remind us of him, still. Sometimes we’ll play new games, and we’ll think about how Andrew would have loved it if he were still around. A group of us started playing Big Walk recently and I can’t help but feel like Andrew would’ve been all over that. I saw his account on steam recently, when I was joining someone else’s Big Walk session. He hasn’t been online for 1 year, 2 months. Wonder if they have steam, wherever he is.
It’s not just games, of course. Sometimes it’s music. I nearly teared up while listening to The Trapeze Swinger the other day, while on a cruise through some fjords. Other times it’s something silly, like confusing which Andrew we’re talking about. “Gotta go see Andrew tomorrow for dinner.” Wait that Andrew? No, he means Andrew L, or Andrew A, or Andrew V, or the other Andrew A. Not that Andrew.
I think it’s the absence of things that, strangely, reminds me the most of him. Mia and I haven’t really touched the Civilization series since he passed. For a while I think it just felt wrong to play a game of Civ without him. Eventually, later, we did play one game of Civ 7, maybe about two months back, but we didn’t finish it. Mia quit when I declared war on her in the first Age. She was winning, and was mad that I declared war at all. We never picked up that game, or the series, again after that. Not because of the war thing, just because I think we realized Andrew’s presence really made the game fun. He wouldn’t have quit just because someone declared war, he’d think it weak and cowardly, he would’ve stuck it out to the end. And that in itself was an important way to approach things. At the least, it made the game far more fun. Knowing you have an ‘instantly make your opponent resign’ button just takes the wind out of everything.
I played Civ for a huge part of my life, from junior year of college until last year. So now, the absence of Civ reminds me of what changed, and that reminds me of Andrew, too. And that’s strange. There are other things like that — for e.g. I don’t really visit DC anymore because I don’t really have as much a reason to. There is always going to be a before and after but I think it’s rare for something to be so clearly demarcated.
As an aside, on the superstitious / conspiratorial thinking bit. Mia told me the other day that she sometimes wonders if Andrew is secretly still alive, like a secret agent or a spy. I get that. Sometimes I wonder the same thing. Insane for that sort of thing to pop into one’s head, even more so to want to believe it so badly that for a moment you do believe it. He’s still out there, in Australia, in a convertible driving on the coast. He still has a lot to give to the world, a lot of potential.
That was something that a lot of people said, afterwards, when they found out. The tragedy was made more acute by the overwhelming feeling that this particular person had a rich and valuable life ahead of him. He was going to be somebody, and do good things for the world. He died right around 30. I think we all missed out in some small way, even the people who didn’t know him or never met him, because he never got to do the things he was going to do for the world.
Are deaths a bit like weddings? The first one that happens in your age group / friend circle is a momentous occasion. And it probably also happens a bit earlier than you’d expect it to. But then by the 10th or 15th you sorta get numb to it. I’ve gone to like 25 weddings and I’m kinda sick of them at this point (if you’re reading this and your wedding is coming up, know that I do not mean your wedding. Your wedding is extremely special to me). Is that how it is as you get older and time takes its toll? I kinda hope so. This kind of soft long lasting grief isn’t for me. I can’t imagine just having this happen again and again. It would just make everything so emotionally fraught, every single thing reminding of someone.
Anyway, wherever he is I bet he’s rolling his eyes, telling me to get over it, or else grinning that he’s made my life more difficult. That bastard. Going to give him a good left hook to the jaw when I see him again.