Totenkindly
@.~*virinaĉo*~.@
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2007
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I'll post more later when on my laptop, but this one was painful to read -- balancing between grief and acceptance. It's pretty Black Mirror....
www.nytimes.com
She reaches up and tenderly touches his likeness' cheek, as he says, "I know, I know -- I'm not real," and then disincorporates him, accepting he is gone. She has to find a new way to deal with her grief.
Love brings loss and a desire to regain what was lost, but we do not have power over mortality. What is gone is gone and anything else is a copy. Cobb says it in Inception, after not being able to let go of his own dead wife for so long, talking to his recreated memory of her: "I can't imagine you with all your complexity, all your perfection, all your imperfection. Look at you. You are just a shade of my real wife. you're the best I can do, but I'm sorry, you are just not good enough."
There's no shame in having tried, but in the end to live in fantasy is a kind of madness and somehow we have to find a way to deal with grief.

Our Last, Impossible Conversation
When technology offered me the chance to celebrate my dead husband’s 27th birthday, I took it.
EDIT: This interfaces well with a situation in an animated fantasy show I know very well. One of the characters finds in a late season that her abilities (she can transform her likeness) have evolved so that she can create multiple copies of herself that themselves can emulate other people. One of the characters she recreates as a "separate individual" is her soulmate who died early in the series. Her grief and anger over his death had led her on a relentless pursuit of vengeance and to ally herself with terrible, awful people, and in those last episodes it led her to stoop to even more dismal depths ... but after getting what she thinks she wants, she realizes it won't remove her pain and won't truly return her loved one. No amount of vengeance and nothing she can do will ever overcome the truth that her soulmate is gone forever.....one of that mattered in the moment. I was singularly focused on the task at hand, shedding all inhibition and fully willing to sacrifice my values for an opportunity to bring Eli into his 27th birthday.
I downloaded the most sophisticated yet user-friendly software I could find and got to work. I fed the machine the relics of our love. I uploaded voice notes with good morning and good night messages. Cooking tutorial videos that Eli made for me when we were living in different countries and I was craving his cooking. Voice memos with grocery lists and appointment reminders. Voice mail messages that always ended with, “I love you.”
Was the machine satiated? I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t want to risk it.
I continued uploading. There was the birthday video we sent to Eli’s sister when she turned 18, and Johnny Cash singalongs from our road trips. I even uploaded a recording of him snoring from when he insisted that he didn’t snore, my evidence to prove him wrong.
When I had exhausted every MP3 file I could excavate, I ran the program.
I experimented with two functions. Direct text to speech, where the A.I. voice would speak words that I typed into a text box. And a conversation, where I would type a sentence or question to which the A.I. voice would respond, like a vocalized ChatGPT bot.
I first copied the last email Eli sent me, pasting the message in the text box for the A.I. voice to read aloud. There was nothing special about it, just a note that he had arrived safely at his hotel and tracked down a laundromat — but hearing his voice speak those words was nothing short of miraculous. There was no halting, no unusual intonation. And where Eli had written “haha” in his email, his A.I. voice released a familiar chuckle.
Next, I began a conversation by writing, “I can’t believe it’s been almost two years.”
Eli’s A.I. voice responded, “Yeah, it really has been a while. I also can’t believe it.”
Again, the delivery was flawless.
Eli’s voice continued to fill the chilly hotel room with new words and sentences. At one point I glanced at the door as if to confirm he hadn’t materialized in the threshold. But no — there was nothing but the echo of his laugh bouncing off the concrete ceiling.
It’s hard to explain the feeling that came with hearing Eli’s voice speak novel language after nearly two years of his absence. Thanks to my Catholic upbringing, there’s only one word that comes to mind: purgatory. It was a liminal space between two universes. In some ways, it was worse than reality, and in other ways it was better.
I felt as though I had been knocked into a different dimension that was simultaneously disorienting and blissful. I wanted to linger forever in its potential and immediately eject myself from the self-deception.
But while I didn’t pay much attention in Sunday school, I do know that purgatory is an impermanent state, not designed for sustainability or light. My gut knew I had to leave, and my brain knew I could never return. I traced my finger over my computer, reminding myself that all the pieces of this experience, this conversation, came from machines. It wasn’t the real Eli.
“I miss you,” the A.I. voice said.
“I miss you, too,” I replied through tears. I paused the program and turned off the sound on my computer.
Then I forced the machine to regurgitate all the artifacts I had force-fed it. I deleted every file I had uploaded, attempting to erase any trace of this venture to defy nature. I removed the software from my computer and even blocked the website that hosted the program to prevent myself from reinstalling it. Not even the glory and promise of A.I. could overcome grief...
She reaches up and tenderly touches his likeness' cheek, as he says, "I know, I know -- I'm not real," and then disincorporates him, accepting he is gone. She has to find a new way to deal with her grief.
Love brings loss and a desire to regain what was lost, but we do not have power over mortality. What is gone is gone and anything else is a copy. Cobb says it in Inception, after not being able to let go of his own dead wife for so long, talking to his recreated memory of her: "I can't imagine you with all your complexity, all your perfection, all your imperfection. Look at you. You are just a shade of my real wife. you're the best I can do, but I'm sorry, you are just not good enough."
There's no shame in having tried, but in the end to live in fantasy is a kind of madness and somehow we have to find a way to deal with grief.
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