#7: Leaving Your Legacy and Stories Behind
Do we have control over what we leave behind?
How to Be Remembered
For some kind of escapism and a reward when I get my work done, I’ve been making a return to video games this month. One game that I had looked forward to playing was What Remains of Edith Finch, an indie game that has a run time of around two hours total. It’s a game that has been dubbed a walking simulator, an often negative thing in gaming, but many reviewers looked past this claim since the story was said to be incredible.
What Remains of Edith Finch is about Edith who is returning to her family home in the Pacific Northwest. The Finches are cursed to die young and in unnatural ways, and Edith is the last of her family alive. As Edith, you explore her huge and strange Tim Burton-esque house that rises above the forest on Orcas Island.
Each family bedroom is frozen in time and remains exactly as it had the day the family member died. In the bedroom, there is a shrine dedicated to them with a painted portrait. When you find it, you are taken back to the day of their death and learn exactly what occurred. Some deaths are ambiguous and metaphorical, others are straightforward and realistic. As Edith learns what happens to her family, both of you wonder: Is it worth letting these stories consume her? Is the curse real, or did it originate from the family’s obsession of death? Which actually came first? The curse began as a warning — watch out, you might be in danger at some point, don’t take any risks — but becomes an all encompassing legacy for the Finches.
It’s human to want a legacy after we pass away. Everyone wants to be remembered, either through what they create or how they lived. Edith Finch touches on a family’s legacy and how people are remembered, whether it’s due to infamy or virtue or their death alone. It made me think about the attachment I’ve had to my great uncle who has passed on before I was born, and how I have romanticized who he had been, perhaps only because I didn’t know who he was.
My grandmother gave me a small rosary box that my Great Uncle Leo had painted himself before he left for WWII. Leo died in WWII when he was only 22 years old. I’ve daydreamed about who Leo was, how he died, and who he could have been if he had lived. I have found some kind of connection between us from the fact that he died July 10th and my birthday is July 11th. This connection is not because he had lived, but because of the story he had left behind for me to hear from my grandmother and for me to imagine in my head.
These characters who have passed on in Edith Finch are memorable in the same way. Edith does not memorialize her mother — who only passed recently — as much as she does for those who passed before Edith was born. Perhaps it allows Edith to have control over the meaning of their deaths and their legacies, instilling more significance into their lives. Edith’s grandfather went on a hunting trip with his daughter (Edith’s mom), and from Edith’s perspective, it’s a touching father-daughter bonding experience. In the video game, we are taking photos of Edith’s young mother and grandfather as a mini-game, trying to find them in the woods as they set up camp, look at the lake, enjoy nature. Eventually, Edith’s mother shoots a deer after her father insists it will be a good experience. When they pose for a photo with the kill, the deer, still alive, kicks Edith’s grandfather off a cliff.
The nostalgic memory leading up to Edith’s grandfather’s death is only because he is gone. Otherwise, this trip might have been a bad memory for Edith’s mother — recalling that time her dad made her shoot a deer. But now, it’s memorialized as Edith’s grandfather trying to strengthen the bond between him and his daughter only to have that attempt be tragically cut short by the family curse. The trip is now viewed through rose-colored glasses by Edith (and perhaps her mother, but we never get her point of view).
The same goes for my uncle’s rosary box. If he had lived, it’s suffice to say it would have been lost or damaged. It would have likely been something that someone might have said “What, that old thing?” about. But death creates memorials out of objects and stories, even if the dead might not want it that way.
A long time ago, I read Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman. It had a small story that mentioned the third death.
“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
The micro-fiction describes an afterlife where people who have not yet experienced the third death wait in a lobby. Those who have been there for too long and suffering under the fluorescent lights wait for people to forget them and stop uttering their name, stop talking about them in substack posts, just so they can move on. They become frustrated with what they have become and remembered as — there’s no more control over what story they can tell, and they can no longer change the story.
“And that is the curse of this room: since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.”
In What Remains of Edith Finch, the family becomes obsessive with the stories of those who have passed away to the point of possible harm. The family members are no longer people, but mythical beings, memorialized with their literal bedrooms becoming museums about who they used to be. Am I doing the same when I think of my uncle Leo? I have control over who he is and his history than he does, and it would be my turn to pass on his legacy at some point. But is there a line to what responsibility I have since I did not know him at all?
Pretend It’s a City with Martin Scorsese and Fran Lebowitz just talking and laughing. Love Fran’s views on art, books, and people.
Terrell Jermaine Starr eating shashlik in Uzbekistan, “the best shashlik he’s ever had.”
3. Revisiting Gwen Stefani’s “Cool” music video in Sydney Urbanek’s piece “‘It’s good to see you now with someone else’: Hope and Heartache in Gwen Stefani’s ‘Cool.’” “The other possibility is that Gwen wanted to demonstrate her coolness to the world, maybe even to herself. Prior to “Cool,” the public had never been given something to wrap up the aforementioned Tony and Gwen breakup saga — to put an end to a chapter in a really nice way.”
4. Not knowing what fun is anymore. The loss of fun. Rachel Sugar addresses the question during our new Covid-19 life: What was fun? “All routines had been disrupted — schools were closed, offices were done, grocery stores were minefields, toilet paper was out — and everything was terrible, but at least fear was a novelty. Now nothing is new — even the news is not new, so much as it is escalating variations on the same ghoulish set of themes. To be lucky, now, is to have all the days feel like all the other days.”
5. Bill Cunningham: New York. Did not know anything about Bill Cunningham before watching this and I loved seeing how passionate he was about his craft and just living his life loving doing what he loved.