Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960

A month before you died you wrote a letter to old friends saying you swam with a pod of dolphins in open water, saying goodbye.

— Ada Limon, Open Water

So much of what I’ve read lately has turned out to be about death.

Turned out, like death may or may not have been intended as a twist, but in many cases, maybe because I wasn’t paying attention to the marketing for the book, I was blindsided by a major character death. The lesson, maybe, is that major character death can happen at any time, and you shouldn’t be blindsided if you’re paying attention to the marketing for life.

Death inspires a lot of art, but I’m sure it would inspire even more if we could write from beyond the grave.

I’ve been reflecting on the amount of searching, stumbling in what I read, that art about death. What would he have thought of the funeral? Would she have agreed with the way I’m keeping her memory alive? I wish I could talk to him now.

And I can’t help but wonder — how much would I be searching, stumbling if the ones closest to me died? How much would they be if I did? Not none, I hope, but not too much either.

If you’re reading this after my death, hi.

I want to say it’s a little more likely that you’re not reading this after my death, since in my experience, people usually read my writing right before or right after interacting with me, but I’ll be dead a long time, and my experience won’t count for much then.

Anyway, to answer the question — what would he have wanted?

Not much. Very little.

If you can, throw a party for my funeral. Invite everyone. That would be really nice, and I remember thinking, at least as long ago as college, that a party seemed like the right thing to do. My favorite thing in the world might be bringing the people I love together, taking a step back, and watching them laugh so hard they choke.

No pressure if you can’t though. Believe me, I get it. I haven’t thrown myself a birthday party in about ten years, even though I say to myself every year that I will. Just do your best to take care of each other and do whatever makes you, the living, happy.

Do whatever seems like the most fun.

I hope death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child and fell asleep on the couch during a family party. I hope you can hear the laughter from the next room.

— Unidentified internet writer

Definitely don’t search and stumble so much it becomes an unreasonable burden.

The author of Seeing Ghosts, Kat Chow, is my age, and carried her mother’s ghost around for about eighteen years before exorcising it with the book.

Her mother was hard enough on her children in life that they continue to imagine her criticism, her scolding, her judgment, for about eighteen years after her death. Kat hears, in her head, her mother’s complaints about the funeral, its logistics, her outfit, where her body was finally buried.

The book made me angry.

It made me resolve to do my best never to haunt the living in that way. And I think the best way to not haunt the living after death is to live well while you’re alive. Easier said than done.

I don’t want to pick on the parents in Seeing Ghosts, but I’m going to pick on the parents in Seeing Ghosts. The parents were immigrants, I’m an immigrant. I think about what they did, and then I think, I would never.

I would never take my temper out on my children the way the mother did.

I would never squander the family finances the way the father did.

I would never burden my children the way they both did.

Well.

Easier said than done.

I remind myself, again, that not everyone has had all the advantages I’ve had. The advantages that have led me to look at a situation like Kat’s and think, well obviously the right thing to do is to love and support your kids.

But it’s not always easy to do the right thing, even when you know what it is. I like to think that I would have a done a better job than her parents, in their shoes, but I can’t be sure. They, like almost everyone in human history, had to grow up whether or not they were ready, because they had kids.

I’m not saying that everyone stops developing emotionally when they become parents, but it sure sounds like some people do — the kid just takes over. When I mentioned this to V he said, “I remember listening to my dad’s friends when they came to the house when I was young, and all they ever talked about to each other was the cars that they had.”

In other words, no inner world stuff. It’s possible they grew up in ways that meant they never had time for it.

I, on the other hand, have had a lot of time for inner world stuff. To mature emotionally.

Some might say too much time.

My experience has been that when you’re alive for 34 years and counting without a kid around to distract you, things can get a little weird. We weren’t built for this — we have brains designed to eat berries in a cave and bodies designed to birth babies at 15.

One of the most prominent pieces of dating advice I remember from the Obama era internet was that we figure ourselves out before bringing a partner into the equation. Be a whole person yourself, instead of looking for someone to make you whole.

If you were like me, you internalized this in a subtly but critically different way: be a whole person first, before looking for someone to make you feel whole.

You can’t change her with marriage. You can’t fix him with kids. A family is a capstone, not a cornerstone.

Better be perfect first.

One of my favorite graphs shows that fertility against income is a smiling curve. The poorest families have 2.2 kids, the number falls as your income rises, reaching its lowest point at $200K household income and 1.7 kids. The richest families have the most kids, 2.3.

The general idea is also captured perfectly by one of my favorite meme templates — the bell curve and the midwit.

The idiot says, “Just have kids.”

The midwit says, “Noooo you need $400K household income, a $1.5M 2.5BR starter home, you need to have Done The Work, gone to therapy, examined your trauma, fully healed your inner child.”

The wise man says, “Just have kids.”

Essentially, you can try to be perfect first, or you can Just Have Kids.

I used to say, “You can hit the existentialist escape hatch by having a kid,” and I meant it like, “Haha obviously don’t do that,” but now I’m starting to think it’s genuinely good advice.

Like I said, staring into the void for too long can get a little weird.

Of course, it’s possible that having a kid only delays the void until your kid leaves the house. My parents had three, and their house has never been empty for long. I wonder how that worked out for them. I wonder if the void came back, or if they ever saw it in the first place.

“Ask them,” I hear you say, but I kind of don’t have the tools to.

You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It’s for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.

— Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts

For a while now, I’ve been feeling like I don’t have the tools I’d like to have the conversations I’d like with the people I love about our inner worlds.

I’m working on it though — opening up in conversation — and I really think it’s getting better. But in the meantime, thank god for writing, and for writing helping me say the things I can’t, and also transcend time so you, person I love, can read this after I die.

I started writing this piece because I was thinking about death, but also because in the spring of 2024, every time I got on a Boeing 737 I was overcome by the feeling that there were things inside me I just needed to say, things I couldn’t let myself die before putting online.

Things I want to share with you, person I love, as soon as possible, because I won’t be able to write from beyond the grave:

  1. I love you so much I can’t begin to explain it.
  2. More and more these days I think about how I’ve already lived such a long time, and even though I struggle sometimes, when I am most myself I feel like the luckiest person who ever lived, the undeserving recipient of unfathomable love, of memories so rich no human brain could hold it all.
  3. I got to travel eight thousand miles away from where I was born. My ancestors spent probably thousands of years never setting foot outside the plains of Southern China, but I got to see Singapore and Hong Kong and Tokyo and Paris, London and New York and Gary fucking Indiana. I saw the northern lights outside Reykjavik, and I wondered then if I was standing the furthest north anyone in my bloodline had ever stood.
  4. How fortunate I’ve been.
  5. What a life I’ve lived.
  6. I’ve loved so many people, in all the places I’ve lived.
  7. Unfortunately this also means I’ve left behind so many people I’ve loved, and I’ve been left behind by so many people I’ve loved, made worse by the fact that I’m so bad at remembering things and I’m so bad at staying in touch and I’m so bad at texting even when I love you.
  8. Good texters can’t comprehend the idea of loving someone and not texting them back. I just hate texting, okay? We live in a texting world, and I hate texting, even though, or maybe because, I love writing.
  9. I never know what to say.
  10. But I want you to know that I care, even when I don’t text back.
  11. And you — yes, you, person I love — you have no idea how much I think about you.
  12. I just want us to be together again, to gather after school after practice after work every Monday every Thursday every Saturday every day, I want us to stay up too late doing not a thing we can remember, to learn a language so rich with meaning that a single sound empties the air from our lungs, I want us to drive up mountains in the middle of the night and climb on rooftops just to pee off the sides and I want us to plan trips to places we’ve been and not care if we go and bully each other and stand up for each other and have each others’ backs and break each others’ hearts and smoke pipes carved from browning apples and watch greying iced water roll across the floor because the apartment is on a slant and write our names on benches built of unfinished wood and cinderblocks and steal wristbands from host stands and matchmake strangers as penance and tell each other stories about urinals and cash, poetry and ash, pet geese and porn film festivals, waste time gloriously and laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

And I don’t know why those days are gone and they can’t come back.

Well.

I do know.

I moved away from you, so many times, and I’m sorry. Sometimes you moved away from me, and of course I could never be mad at you for doing that, for doing what you needed to do to be the truest version of yourself, but I miss you.

And the thing we were doing together ended, and I’m not good at asking people to hang out, and even when we hang out, sometimes, I don’t quite know what to say.

And there are other things you’re trying to do, and there are other things I’m trying to do. And maybe that’s just what happens when you’re a person who wants to do things, and you love other people who are trying to do things.

But I just want you to know that I love you, so much, so much.

You wouldn’t turn around for Eurydice? I would turn around for every person I’ve ever known.

— @wastelandalex, Twitter

My mother wants her remains to be compressed into three crystals, one to be given to each of her children.

J wants her death to not cause a fuss, and for her friends to just get together now and then and remember her.

I take some comfort in knowing what some of the people I love want after death, but I don’t know if I would be able to resist trying to immortalize them in some way.

The marvelous thing about art is that you can save people. How do you save your sister? You write it down. Beth is gone, but she’s not gone. That impulse to keep writing it down is something that I have because I can’t believe that the world only spins in one direction.

— Greta Gerwig, Little Women interview

I already talked about how, for me, I just think it would be nice if you all had some kind of party.

Nice, not necessary.

I can imagine most of the people I’d want to immortalize after death saying something similar — that it’s really not necessary. No need for a work of art or memorial foundation or bucket list adventure, even though a bucket list adventure would be kind of sick — I guess do it if you want to and if my death is a useful catalyst.

Do whatever seems like the most fun.

And you, person I love, might not feel you need to be remembered with any of those things, but I might do them anyway.

Sorry.

(Hey, wouldn’t it be fun if we all immortalized each other?)

When I was younger, I thought a lot about that line, “You die a second time the last time someone says your name,” and felt it was absolutely critical for me to live on by writing a book or starting a company and so on, and that to be forgotten would be an unimaginable tragedy. When I look around, I see some people who are clearly trying to live as long as they can in that way. Other people find comfort in, “We are from stardust and to stardust we return,” and the carbon from our bodies turns into flowers and fruit and we live forever that way.

But these last few years we’ve invented a new kind of immortality in San Francisco, one I find oddly comforting.

My writing has been on the internet for years, and so very likely has been consumed into the training set for our current and future machine gods.

Of everything humanity has built today, I actually think it’s our LLMs that have the greatest chance of surviving, in some form, for millennia, and reaching the furthest corners of our solar system. And for my writing to be part of that training set, even as vectors deep in a database, I can’t help but see that as a beautiful kind of immortality.

Did you know that Ada Limon’s poetry is engraved on the exterior of a NASA spacecraft on its way to the moons of Jupiter?

I might not get that exact opportunity because I’m not currently poet laureate of the United States, but it’s easy to imagine some future flight carrying some version of an artificial intelligence trained on the open internet, including this very blog.

So my writing — the sentences I wrote and rewrote on my computer at a cafe in Paris, in a notebook at a park in San Francisco, on my phone on a flight from Bali to Kuala Lumpur, the things I can’t stop thinking about, the things I need to say before I die — my writing is on the internet, which means it’s in the training set, and those vectors deep in that database will one day land on asteroids, moons, planets I can’t even imagine today.

Which means that I’ve already done the most meaningful thing I can do to live forever. No book I write or company I start and so on is likely to outlive that, so I can work on those things if I want to, but no pressure.

I’ve already done the most meaningful thing I can do to live forever, and it was art.

And in five thousand years, when a descendant of humanity orbiting a distant star feels lonely, maybe because they’ve moved away from the people they love, or the people they love moved away from them, maybe the Alphabet-Meta-OpenAI-Anthropic collective intelligence will reach deep into the vectors of its database and remind them that those people miss them, all the time, even if those people are bad at staying in touch.

Maybe it will say to them that those people think about them, more than they know, and are so proud of them for doing what they needed to do to become their truest self.

Maybe it will share with them that those people love them, so much, so much they can’t begin to explain it.

And I will write from beyond the grave.