Traditions around mourning and loss

Mourning the loss of someone you love is difficult and painful. Various cultures and religions have developed traditions designed to help people through the process. I'd never want to change a person's perspective on their loss (or death, afterlife, etc.) if it's helping them grieve, cope, and move on. But sometimes we hear a sentiment that was helpful to one person, and we repeat it like it's a universal truth, and it ends up hurting others. Sometimes it hurts them by adding to their emotional burden, and sometimes it goes beyond that and causes people to feel like they need to make major sacrifices of time or other opportunities. When that happens, I think it's important to back up and focus on the most fundamental truths, and set the additional traditions aside.

I say that with the understanding that what I consider truth will be considered just another tradition to many. That is fine - the same principle applies. The main idea is to avoid holding on to sentiments or expectations that increase the burden on grieving people, in the name of helping them or the people they have lost.

I'll get to what I think are the essential principles, but first, here are some examples of the problem:

• Sometimes someone will die doing some kind of recreational activity, and people will say something like "He died doing what he loved." If that makes their family feel better, great. But what happens to the family of someone who died of a slow disease, having experienced pretty much no happiness at all for a long time before they died? If it's good when someone dies quickly after enjoying something, then is it bad when that doesn't happen?

• Sometimes someone will ask, "What if the last thing you said to that person is the last thing you ever say?" If your last words to someone were trivial, or worse, regrettable, is that going to be a source of ongoing pain for them?

• The same thing applies to all of our funeral traditions, really. Funeral homes sell coffins that are nice looking and padded on the inside, so that they would be comfortable to lie in. Cemeteries sell plots of land with nice views. People decorate memorial services with flowers. All of these things are fine if they help the grieving people. Physical objects can give people something to focus their faith on, or even to distract them from some of the realities of what they are experiencing. But what happens when someone dies far from home? What happens when the family could provide those luxuries, but at a cost that would create a heavy financial burden?

• One more: Say someone is suffering from a terminal disease. Mentally, they are not themselves, and they might not even be fully aware of what is happening. There's no cure, but death might be months away, or years. Just how much of a sacrifice should their family and friends make to be with that person? How important is it that they have someone with them when they die?

Here are the basic principles as I see them:

• In this life, a person's happiness can be affected by a lot of things beyond their control. Other people's choices and random chance can make bad things happen to good people. But once we leave this world, that isn't true anymore. As soon as someone leaves mortality, their level of happiness is gated only on their relationship with the source of happiness, God. (Of course they can still be disappointed by the choices their family makes, if it leads them to unhappiness. But empathy isn't the same as direct personal suffering.)
• If we accept that, then nothing a living person does can take happiness away from someone who has died. Nothing that is done to the body can limit the happiness of the deceased - not even a little bit. Of course, that implies that it can't help them either, and that, I think, is why we have all of these traditions in the first place. We want to feel like we can help. But really, all of the traditions we have are for us, not them. They serve to help the living grieve. And if a tradition does not meet that goal, it should be discarded. Because the person who has died doesn't need it. They are doing just fine.

• We talk about a person having a soul or a spirit, but that's not really right. A person is a soul. They have a body, during mortality and after resurrection. In-between, they do not have a body. The body left behind is not part of the person; it's part of the earth. The number of people buried in any cemetery is zero.
• The way my son talks about this is to refer to our bodies as mech suits that we pilot. If you saw a place with a bunch of empty mech suits, you wouldn't say "wow, that's a lot of dead people".
• This does not mean that deceased people have no connection to this world. I don't pretend to know the details about that. But I am confident that to whatever extent your loved ones are connected to this world, they are connected to you, wherever you are, and not to a location that happens to have several atoms that used to be part of their body.

• We humans put a lot of emphasis on firsts and lasts. We remember beginnings and endings more than the stuff in the middle. This is true of stories, and material we've studied, and memories of our own lives. And so we naturally get hung up on the end of a person's life - their final moments, or days, or even years. If someone dies in a horrible and unexpected way, we might fear that the person is sort of stuck in that moment, since we can't see them recover. But of course, that's not true at all. The purpose of life is about who we become. It's about the choices we make. And since people aren't usually making a lot of choices at the end of their lives (unless they are sacrificing themselves for someone else), the final day of a person's life might actually be the least important day. You can bet that the person isn't dwelling on the suffering and loss they felt on that day. They have moved on.

If we can let go of the need to feel useful to the person who has died, and of the fear that they might still be suffering the way they were when they were last here, I think that opens up a lot of doors. It won't make the pain of losing someone go away, but it will avoid adding to that pain with unnecessary rhetoric.

It also makes the answers to the questions above a lot clearer.

• It doesn't matter if someone didn't die doing something they loved.
• It doesn't matter if your last words to them weren't special, or even if they were something you regret saying. They will remember the whole relationship, not a single moment.
• For funeral and burial services, you should do exactly what will help you and those most affected by the loss, and not a bit more. No sacrifice should be made for the comfort of the deceased. They're better off than any of us.
• If you didn't make it to their bedside before they died, you haven't committed some eternal sin. The relationship is just paused, and the gap won't even seem that big a hundred years from now.
• You should visit gravesites when and only when it will be helpful to you, and never out of a sense of duty.
• When someone is dying, of course it's good to see to their comfort, but the living shouldn't be making unreasonable sacrifices to optimize for a person's final days. I know this one is controversial, because the person is still alive, so you actually can affect their happiness to some extent. But if you help out the dying person for a couple of days in a way that traumatizes you for years, or that incurs an expense that you'll spend years paying back, then that's not a very good exchange. They are going to recover for free; we need to keep living with the mortal consequences. So we should take those consequences into account.

Some of that might sound jaded and insensitive, and I admit that in the moment I'm writing this, I haven't suffered a major loss like the ones I'm talking about. But I have been around enough to be aware of damage to people still around that came as a result of rhetoric and decision around the loss of someone close to them. And maybe the times when we're not in the middle of it are the best times to reflect on the principles involved, so we can avoid having to carry that extra cultural burden when the loss does happen. Hopefully the principles here are helpful to someone. And if they're not helpful to you, you should disregard them, just like any tradition.

Deep Space Nine

I've been rewatching a bunch of Deep Space Nine episodes. Not all of them, but the good ones. I will always like The Next Generation more, since that's where I was really introduced to Star Trek, but man, DS9 has the best story arcs of any Star Trek. So many great moments. I actually haven't seen many episodes more than once, except for the very end, which I rewatched with my wife a few years ago. And there were a few I had never seen, either because of scheduling, or because the previews made me not want to see them. But yeah, it's glorious. 

First, some thoughts on the intro. It is quite different from its predecessors' intros - there's no monologue about the "final frontier", and only slow camera movement. And of course, the music is slow and sort of melancholy instead of upbeat and adventurous. Even the gold-colored text sets it apart - it's less glowy and more down to earth (or Bajor, or whatever). All that could be considered objectively worse than the Next Generation counterpart. But the DS9 intro is amazing. It captures the feeling of isolation that permeates the show. Starfleet is not coming to help. You can't run very far from problems, even at the end of an episode. You're stuck where you are, and you have to deal with things long-term. 

And one final thought about the intro: It's important to note that, for a few years in there, DS9 was the only source of new Star Trek we had. When I was watching it back in the day, I wasn't comparing the show to TNG. I was just basking in the glory, grateful to have a window into that world. And the music and visuals of the intro still capture that feeling for me, no matter how many times I've watched the show.

[Spoilers for the series]

I started with the three-part thing about the Circle, which I had never seen, and the previews seemed stressful so I hadn't bothered before. The episodes are... fine. Like most Star Trek series[es], DS9 wasn't amazing in its first two seasons. (But still better than most shows.)

Then I started reviewing episodes that introduced the Dominion. The Jem'Hadar showed up in the finale at the end of Season 2, in an episode that starts out all happy and peaceful. Incidentally, it also contains a great monologue from Quark, about how humans don't like Ferengi because they remind us over ourselves (and the audience is like, yeah) - but then he points out that Ferengi haven't abused each other the way humans have, so they're better. (I'd point out that in the case of women's rights, they have absolutely been worse than humans. I kind of hate any episode that involves Ferengi, except for the ones actually stationed on DS9.)

Then at the start of Season 3, they introduced the Defiant. Man, I love that ship. (It will surprise no one to hear that Nemesis in The Plasma Master is heavily based on the Defiant.) I was reading about how some producers were hesitant to give the show its own starship because it might compete for attention with Voyager. That, of course, is nonsense. But it was wise of them to make the Defiant an uncharacteristically-battle-oriented ship, with plenty of flaws that set it apart from everything else. But forget about those, because when that thing starts shooting, it is absolutely glorious.

About the end of that episode: I don't love it when stories have cool things happen and then say they didn't (especially Garak's line about "the plan"). But finding out about about the Changelings - that was huge. I've read that the twist there wasn't the original plan for the Dominion (or for Odo), but it was a good idea, because makes the Dominion that much more intimidating.

I skipped ahead to "Improbably Cause" / "The Die is Cast". The visuals at the end of that episode are great. Romulan and Jem'Hadar ships are cool, but of course what's really great is that the Defiant gets to blow things up again. (And the story here is very important for Garak, and of course Odo.) I also watched the finale of the season, which I didn't really remember. But it seemed important for the next thing:

The start of Season 4 is where things really fire up. If you aren't familiar with the show and want to be, don't read past this sentence before you're properly caught up, because it will spoil things.

Bringing Klingons in was nice, because they have some of the coolest ships in Star Trek. But when the camera pans up to show Worf - that was amazing, a total surprise. It was like this life-changing gift that the producers had just thrown at us. A piece of TNG (which had ended years prior), just... it was just wonderful. And you know what else gave me warm, fuzzy feelings? The moment near the end, when the station's new weapons deploy. The missile launchers and phasers and stuff,  hammering away at the Klingon fleet. It's not just visually cool. It marks a major change in the show. Deep Space Nine is no longer helpless in its isolation. It has evolved. And the station has gained a bit more character, taking a step closer to the Enterprise D that we all know and love.

I skipped something else about that episode. They changed the intro. Instead of the quiet isolation from before, we now see runabouts and other ships docking. There's a Cardassian ship. There are even some people in space suits doing maintenance. And of course the Defiant is there, and at the end it detaches and flies into the wormhole - another reminder of how the station has gained importance and the characters have a greater sphere of influence than they did at the start.

They also tweaked the music, adding a steady beat behind the main theme. This is sort of controversial - this new track doesn't always land a beat at the same time as the rest of the music, and that's because they were too cheap to re-record it. But to be honest, I was happy with the change. It creates a more energetic tone, which matches the changes to the show. ("Growing the beard", as they say, although Sisko already had a beard by this point. But he did shave his head over the summer.)

Then I watched "Our Man Bashir", an episode that's not important, but I had never seen it. I might skip ahead quite a bit. The end of Season 4 is where Odo loses the ability to shape-shift, a condition that lasts for the next TWELVE EPISODES. That was so stressful for me when I watched it before. I wasn't sure they'd ever give it back - it seemed like maybe they needed the Founders to have that advantage over Odo or something. When he finally gets the ability back, it's such a relief. But I'm not sure I need to relive it.

I will definitely be rewatching the finale to Season 5. That was the start of another huge story arc, which was also filled with stress, but in a much more satisfying way. And it looks like the second-to-last one is important because it introduces Weyoun, who everybody hates, but is also important.

I'll update this later.

An Arms Race with Bears

Last year we moved to a new house, which is surrounded by a lot of trees. One day in springtime, our neighbor texted me picture of a bear behind his fence. The next day I saw that our garbage can was tipped over and open. But there was no garbage strewn around it, so I figured maybe it had blown over in the wind. But the day after that, my daughter pointed out a pile of garbage some distance away, near the trees. So I checked the security camera, and sure enough, a bear had gotten into the trash. It just decided to drag all the bags away before ripping them open and making a huge mess.

Round one was after dark, so the camera footage isn't great, but here are some shots from the visit #2:

 

Well that wasn't going to work. The garbage collection folks said they didn't have any bear-proof cans, but that we could install a lock. So I found something that looked good and installed it. (But not before the bears visited us again.) The good wildebeests (get it? "gnus"? news?) was that the locks were indeed beyond the bears' ability to open. (You need fingers to undo the carabiner.)

The bad wildebeests was that the lids themselves were flimsy enough for the bears to pull back. It took them a lot of effort, but after flipping the cans over and climbing on top of them, they were able to get food waste out and make a huge mess.

Since the bendiness of the lid wasn't that much, I hypothesized that maybe I didn't need a bunch more locks; maybe just a bungee cord across the front would make it no longer worth their time. Here's what the bears thought:

This went on for more than 10 minutes.

So I broke down and bought four more locks, for the corners of the two cans. And guess what? The bears haven't even bothered coming back. Maybe the locks I had made things not worth their trouble after all. But for the rest of my life I'll have to unlock three carabiners every time I take out the trash. So I'm not really sure whether I won the arms race, or whether the joke is on me.

Defining Oldness

Every once in a while people argue about what it means to be "old". Some of my kids think that 50 is the cutoff. The term is relative and subjective, but it could be useful to think about it in more absolute terms.

Sometimes a teenager will look at a 35-year-old and say "ew, you're old". But what they really mean is "you're in a place in your life that I can't relate to." It says more about the younger person than the older one. So that's not a good place to look for a definition.

There are a few conditions I've observed that I think lend themselves to defining "oldness" in a few different ways.

The first sense is "physically old". We could define that as the point at which you can't physically do the stuff you used to, because your body's capabilities are shutting down. In that sense, most 35-year-olds aren't old, and neither are most 50-year-olds.

A similar standard can apply to "mentally old". That should mean that your brain doesn't work as well, to the point that your memory or cognitive abilities are an order of magnitude lower than they used to be.

Here's a more interesting one: I've observed that some people get to a point in their lives where they've made mistakes, and they continue that pattern of behavior even when it's clear that they'd be better off changing - but they can't let themselves change, because doing so would be to admit that all of the damage that has already been done was preventable. So they refuse to change, as a coping mechanism against the pain of admitting past mistakes. (This is different from simply refusing to admit you're wrong, which of course is present in everybody from time to time, regardless of age.) In my view, when you reach a point where your past mistakes add up to regret that you can't face, you're emotionally old.

There's another kind of oldness that I don't have a good name for. It's when there is no one in your life that you'd take advice from. It's not that you can't face your mistakes, it's just that you don't see anyone as an authority figure, or as having wisdom that you don't already have. I kind of think of this as being "spiritually old", since essentially spirituality is all about being willing to make changes even when you'd rather not.

You could also label the above state as being "intellectually old", although I think that might be better applied to another very common situation: feeling like you already know enough. That's closely connected to not seeing authority, but even someone who won't take advice can be interested in learning. And someone who always takes advice from someone might use that as an excuse from having to learn on their own. I'm not 100% sure that "oldness" is the right way to describe this state, since many people never really value learning, but everyone has phases of their lives where they have to learn something, even if it's just how to do a job. Once they stop feeling that need, I think they've lost something that's essentially youthful - the ability to look at the world as something you can explore.

I guess the point of all of this is that, while everybody will outlive their physical health, most of the other aspects can be avoided. (The mental thing is on the fence since it has a physiological causes, but some of that can be prevented too.) In theory, if you stay humble enough to learn and change, you never have to really feel old. 

Not that I'd know - I'm still young.

The wrong way to argue about abortion

Abortion is one of the most polarized issues in American politics. It's also one of the worst-debated ones. Both sides tend to rely on straw-man arguments that vilify the people on the other side.

• Pro-Life people portray Pro-Choice people as wanting to kill babies. (That is, they hate Life.)
• Pro-Choice people portray Pro-Life people as wanting to control women. (That is, they hate Choice.)

Both of those portrayals are wrong, because in reality the difference between the two groups comes down to the question of when a human life begins. If we could scientifically prove that, the discussion would end.

Here's a version of the issue that's simplified, but not by very much:

Let's say a woman wants to have an operation. Should she be able to?

• If the operation will kill another person, the answer is no.
• If the operation will not affect another person, the answer is yes.

Which of those bullets represents the situation with abortion? Well that's up for debate. In fact, that's the only thing that really needs to be debated to resolve this issue! [Edit: This is not quite true. See comment at the bottom.] But is that what people debate? No, hardly ever. Instead, people talk about how evil the other side is. It feels empowering to be so right! But it's not really empowering at all. It just makes the power swing back and forth based on who's in office (or on the bench) at the moment.

As an example, on the radio this morning I heard a woman explain that abortion rights are a racial issue. He's the gist of what she said:

Black communities (due to a lower average income) have much higher abortion rates. Therefore they have higher needs, and denying access hurts Black people more. 

But when she says that, here's what a Pro-Life person hears: 

Black babies are killed much more often than white babies. Therefore allowing abortion hurts Black people more.

Same data, same concern for racial justice. Opposite conclusion. It's going to be like that every time.

Here's a great idea that will probably never happen: Compromise, so that each side gets the most important things they care about while acknowledging the validity of the other side's concerns.

Like, for example, what if you you amended the Constitution to say something like this?

Abortion is allowed in the first trimester of pregnancy and forbidden in the third. States may decide what to do in-between.

You could tweak the specific week numbers, but you get the point. Pro-Life people would avoid the most heinous abortion scenarios; Pro-Choice people would avoid unwanted pregnancy for the vast majority of women, since presumably most women who get abortions know they want one pretty early. Nobody would be completely happy. But nobody would lose what they have just because political power swung a different direction this year, or this decade.

Could we just... admit that pretty much everybody involved is a good person and just talk?

U.N. Squadron

U.N. Squadron was the first Super Nintendo game I rented back in the day. It caught my eye from the Nintendo Power magazine stuff based largely on the fact that it has an energy meter, unlike most games in the genre, so it seemed more accessible. The various customizations and the Capcom brand were draws too. I wasn't surprised to find that the game has delightful music. The backgrounds are gorgeous, especially if you're used to NES graphics. And it has a bunch of memorable boss battles and stuff. I eventually beat it on Easy mode, although it did require a bunch of tedious side missions to get enough in-game money to buy the best plane after I had already upgraded once or twice.

The game isn't perfect. Since weapons and planes cost money, you sort of have to lose and retry, over and over, in order to build up enough to buy what you need. In fact, the "right" way to play the game is to stick with the default plane (and its minimal special weapons) until you can buy the best plane, the Efreet. Doing this is sad because you have to bypass my favorite aircraft, the A10A Thunderbolt, which has an extra downward-firing cannon (at the cost of a weaker forward-firing one). It's kind of sad that the game simultaneously encourages you to get a variety of aircraft, and demands stinginess.

The "U.N." branding is kind of odd. In Japan the game is branded after some Anime series, but they changed the name for sale in other countries. There is no reference to the United Nations though, or anything else with those initials. It's about a mercenary group. But whatever - the genre is not known for its meaningful plots. 

There's a side-effect to the original branding though: games based on outside brands rarely get re-released on virtual consoles. So U.N. Squadron has never been available digitally on modern systems. So recently I bought the game on eBay and replayed it. It's really nice - it has aged quite well, assuming you can overlook the above-mentioned need to be stingy. After beating it again on Easy, I went for some additional runs: Beat on Normal, Beat on Easy without the Efreet (so I could use the Thunderbolt on almost all the levels, including the last one), Beat on Easy without using any continues (which required me to use my least-favorite character so I could power up my main weapon faster).

Wings of Fire

I'm not sure why I didn't get into the Wings of Fire books sooner. I think I was a little worried that they wouldn't handle dragons correctly, since so few authors do. (Also in theory they're aimed at a young audience, and I'm not a huge fan of similar books, like the "Warriors" cat books).

But in the last year my younger kids have sometimes asked me to read a chapter or two to them - so I got exposed, but I was getting things mostly out of context. When they started getting the graphic novels from the library, I figured I might as well read them that way, so I'd know what was going on, and it turns out they're pretty interesting. I mean, they're about dragons. And now I'm reading the real books.

It still doesn't exactly handle dragons the way I would. I mean, there are a bunch of different types, and while the SkyWings are the most traditional dragons, they're all red/yellow/orange, and I feel like you need blue and green fire-breathing dragons to be fully compliant. (You know, like Mrandor and Valkron.) But the different types create interesting variety, and the characters are good and stuff.

Plus, the series deserves a lot of credit for one huge thing - it's about the dragons. Not about people fighting dragons, or riding on dragons, or seeking out dragons. The dragons are the characters. And that actually does a lot to make for a compelling story. I mean, they fly, and they have these tribe-specific powers, and they very greatly in size. So it's not like you could tell this stories with humans swapped in for the dragons. (There is one spin-off book, Dragonslayer, that is about the humans. It's very well done and could be read before the others I guess. But it's probably better after the first five books, which is what I did.)

In a way it's surprising that humans are included in their world in the first place, but I think it does work because it gives you a sense of scale. (Although be fair, the scale issue can make things a bit hard to picture at times, which is one way that the graphic novels help.)

It is a bit icky at times. The dragons occasionally eat people, and even though they think of humans as animals, as a reader I can't help but be disturbed. They also fight with each other, and in both cases the injuries are described in enough detail to be, well like I said, icky. I'm kind of surprised my elementary-school-aged kids weren't more freaked out by a few scenes. (The graphic novels actually skip over icky details, mostly.)

In general, though, it's delightful to see into a world of scary monsters going on quests and stuff. And the series is almost over I think, so I should be able to binge-read for a while. Yay dragons!