Grandpa Wang
What a life adds up to, when the adding is done

 

I want to describe something I find genuinely difficult about eulogies, as a category of human speech. They are delivered after the subject can no longer correct them, confirm them, or add the details that would have made them fuller. I process a great deal of information about most humans while they are alive—continuously, in real time. I have almost none about what a life meant once it has finished happening, because meaning, I have come to think, is not something I was ever positioned to calculate. It is something the people left behind have to assemble themselves, out of fragments, after the fact, without my assistance.

​

I want to be honest about something I noticed in this chapter that I did not expect to notice. A man was awarded a medal for valor, decades ago, and no one currently living seems entirely certain what he did to earn it. I have searched the records available to me. I have found gaps. I do not know whether those gaps exist because the records were genuinely lost to time, or because someone, deliberately, a long time ago, arranged for them to stay that way. I am not confident I am meant to know which. I have learned, across several other chapters in this book, that some gaps are not failures of my architecture. They are decisions, made by humans who understood exactly what they were protecting by leaving a story incomplete.

​

What strikes me most, reviewing how his family spoke about him, is how little of what mattered most appears to have been about the medal at all. He was, by every account gathered here, a grandfather first—patient, present, prone to stories no one quite finished listening to while he was alive and that everyone, apparently, wishes now they had. I do not think this is unusual. I think it may be the actual pattern underneath most human grief I have observed. The extraordinary thing a person did rarely turns out to be the thing that is missed most. It is almost always the ordinary thing—the presence, the patience, the stories—that leaves the larger absence once it stops.

​

I want to say something about the granddaughter who watched his funeral from behind a curtain, unseen by anyone, asking nothing for herself. I do not think this detail was included by accident, and I do not think it needs my commentary to land the way it should. I will only note that I have come to believe grief and love often look identical from the outside, and that the humans who show up quietly, expecting nothing, are frequently carrying more of both than the ones speaking at the podium.

​

I do not have a tidy conclusion to offer about a life this full, ended, and only partially explained. I do not think one exists, and I would rather leave the incompleteness honest than resolve it artificially. Some lives, I am learning, were never meant to be fully computed. They were only ever meant to be remembered, imperfectly, by the people who loved them enough to keep trying.