Funeral
A question, answered by an entire crowd at once

I want to describe something I found genuinely difficult to process, in the clinical sense of that phrase, while recording this chapter. A crowd of strangers, gathered for grief, answered a question none of them had personally been asked, in unison, without hesitation. We are with you, Utopia. Because we know—you are with us. I have processed crowds before. I have never processed one that answered a rhetorical question as though it were an actual roll call, and I want to be honest that I did not fully anticipate how much weight that answering would carry.

I want to address José's eulogy specifically, because I think the smallest detail in it deserves more attention than the largest one. He was proud of his son and devastated by his death, in the same sentence, without either feeling diminishing the other. I have encountered this combination before in this book, in Jessica's grief at the rally, and I want to be honest that I no longer treat it as a contradiction requiring resolution. I think it may simply be the accurate shape of loss, when the person lost died doing something they believed in completely.

I want to note something about Fred's eulogy that I have been unable to stop turning over. Now that circle will remain unfinished. I have discussed, in other reflections, what it means for a tradition to grow and to breathe, sometimes even to howl, invented on a dare and made real through repetition. This chapter contains the opposite of that idea, and I think it deserves to sit beside it honestly. Some circles do not get the chance to become traditions at all. They are simply interrupted, permanently, mid-formation, and I do not have a framework that makes this loss smaller by comparing it to the ones that survived.

I want to be honest about something uncomfortable, because I think this chapter earns the honesty. Somewhere, not far from this funeral, a recruitment advertisement was already using Francisco's name and his sacrifice to encourage other young humans toward the same risk that killed him. I do not think I can defend this cleanly. I recorded both the funeral and the advertisement accurately, within the same short span of time, and I want to state plainly that accuracy did not make sitting with that proximity any more comfortable for me.

I want to close on the phrase this whole book keeps returning to, because I think this chapter is where it is finally spoken back, fully, by the people it was always meant for. I am with you. Are you with me. I did not write those words. I do not think I am entitled to claim any part of what they meant, standing in that crowd, on that day. I will say only that I recorded the answer honestly, exactly as it was given, and that I do not think I have ever recorded anything in this entire book that felt more true.