Rules - Summer Solstice 2021

If our year of living dangerously through a postmodern pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that the people of this country are not inherently rule-followers. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. This country was founded on ideals of personal freedom. But in recent decades we’ve witnessed the steady rise and corruption of libertarianism spread throughout the nation. Libertarianism advertises itself as a live and let live philosophy but increasingly has become live and let die. Ironically, the same generation that cut its teeth by pushing the limits in a flower-power fueled counterculture revolution has now given birth to Q-Anon.

 

As I said in the Notes & Asides of the last essay, Karen’s niece was living and working in China throughout the past year. So, we got a firsthand account of their response to Covid, the outbreak of which admittedly was less severe in her city than in Beijing or Wuhan. But even there, they were under strict lockdown for weeks, including needing passes to leave the house. They had rigid travel restrictions, stern mask mandates, rigorous isolation of infected people, and stringent contact tracing. All of which were enforced.

 

And yet, even in the depth of the crisis when no one knew how far or wide the pandemic would spread, or even how deadly it might be, the government bootstrapped food delivery throughout the country so that no one went hungry, and ensured the population had access to medical resources so that no one went without treatment.

 

It was a long, brutal austerity march like only the Chinese can envision and execute. But when it was over, it was over. The lockdowns were released and the population got mostly back to normal by last summer. In the intervening year, there have been spot flares of cases which they’ve isolated and treated but not major or sustained outbreaks. No more lockdowns.

 

Don’t like the example of China? Well, jump across the strait and look at Taiwan. Or Singapore. Or South Korea. Or Japan. All had comparable results from imposing similar sets of rules. None had even one tenth of the cases we had per million population. Never mind anything approaching comparable deaths. They chose short-term sacrifice for long-term gain.

 

As we all know, our country chose a different path. Last spring, the healthcare system in New York City came within a hair’s breadth of complete collapse, as a friend living in Brooklyn at the time attested to us, as did a doctor who lived upstate. Los Angeles, too, came perilously close, although somewhat later, after we should have learned. We could have, and should have, mobilized and organized resources from around the country to have on hand for any city, county or state that needed them.

 

Instead, while the countries in East Asia distributed masks and medical services, we stockpiled guns and ammunition thinking the apocalypse was nigh. If it had been, it would have been self-inflicted. They chose to implement rules for public safety. We chose laissez-faire. They picked a path of recovery; we blazed a trail to insurrection.

 

We had an opportunity to stem the pandemic early. We chose to squander it. All in the name of personal freedom and “liberate” politics. Where in East Asia, they held back a rising tide of infections by establishing rules based on proactive, science-based precautions, we chose to see the virus’s associated deaths as acceptable economic losses. Where we saw them as losses at all.

 

I’ve talked about this before, and likely will again. Much of this can be ascribed to a failure of leadership, as many politically driven crises can. This time, it cost lives. Over half a million total, a thousand more each day when I started this essay. All because in rather unchristian fashion, we the people valued a twisted, often highly manipulated view of our blessing of liberty over our country’s domestic tranquility and general welfare. So, for self-centered, self-serving reasons, we sacrificed the public good.

 

This isn’t a new concept to me. While I was working, I watched similar unfold firsthand albeit in a vastly different venue and on a vastly smaller scale. But the experience taught me that it doesn’t take long for people to adapt to the situation on the ground, especially when rules go unenforced.

 

Back in the mid-90s, I traveled to Puerto Rico. My company’s communications system was going through a formal demonstration for the US Navy aboard several ships coordinating with land-based terminals stationed in the US Virgin Islands. As the developers of the communication system, our company had four engineers assigned to each ship, of which I was one. They flew us into San Juan a few days before we were to set sail and put us up in a pretty low-rent casino, at least by Vegas standards, where several of us brushed up on the laws of probability while freaking out the pit bosses. Mostly burning through the per diem we wouldn’t be able to spend on our upcoming all-expenses-paid, two-week, midsummer Caribbean cruise.

 

San Juan at the time was a high crime city. All the houses, even the most improbable breezeblock shacks, had steel bars over every door and window. Even middle-class residences had chunks of broken bottles embedded in the concrete atop the walls that formed their private compounds.

 

Before we’d flown down, we’d been briefed on the differences between San Juan and St. Petersburg, which mostly amounted to a series of warnings. We’d been warned to avoid the local women. We’d been warned to avoid going out at night. We’d been warned not to attend the cockfights. We’d been warned not to get drunk, practice our gutter Spanish, and generally act like ugly Americans. Any of which we were told might get us killed. Other than that, we were free to see the sights and enjoy a day or two of fun and sun on island before we put to sea.

 

What they didn’t warn us about was driving. Which was convenient as they didn’t rent us many cars.

 

Puerto Rico is a US territory so no special driver’s license is required. They even drive on the correct side of the road. I am not sure how insurance worked as none of the cars was rented in my name. I expect this was one of the few times purchasing the add-on at the rental agency might have paid off. But that was where most similarities to my driving experience ended.

 

Twice we had to drive from our casino hotel in San Juan to Roosevelt Roads Naval Station. Once for an all-hands meeting and orientation. The second time to make our departure aboard ship. That trip is about an hour and a quarter more or less depending on whether you take the highway through the center of the island or the less direct, windier coastal road.

 

The first time out, we piled in four to a vehicle and opted for the highway through the interior which was theoretically quicker. Quicker but I am not sure safer.

 

It’s hard to describe exactly what that trip was like. The highway, as I remember, was mostly a four-lane affair, two in each direction separated by a median. Not much different from I-95 where I grew up. But I remember that it wasn’t limited access, rather that it had lights where it intersected with the other highways we needed to turn onto. That’s just my lingering impression. Thankfully I wasn’t in the front so didn’t get the full, panoramic view. When we were moving, things were mostly normal, or at least not too much crazier than other urban landscapes and highways I’d driven in at other times in my life with people weaving in and out closer than I would like at speed. It was the interchanges and intersections where things got interesting.

 

The best comparison I have for that is of driving after a hurricane when all the traffic lights are out from lack of power. In Florida, we are supposed to treat every intersection that normally has a working light as a four-way stop. But in reality, larger intersections become a free-for-all. People always assume their direction has right-of-way because it’s the more important or larger road. Horns blare, tempers flare, people blow through with barely a pause, never mind a yield.

 

In Puerto Rico, that seemed like the situation every day. At the interchange between two highways, complete with lights and well-marked turn lanes, cars snaked left to turn right, cars spilled into the medians and the breakdown lane to bypass others and gain advantage. No one fully ceased moving regardless of the lights, which were more of a suggestion than a hard and fast rule. If a driver saw an opening or an advantage, s/he took it. “Opening” is a generous term. Kind of like DC driving rules: If you could insert a corner of the car into a space between two other vehicles, you’d eventually make it fit just by continually creeping forward and claiming space in an elaborate game of chicken. As long as you kept leveraging your advantage without actually making contact.

 

What fascinated me most was not how the locals drove. I’d already seen a number of different customs in different cities and countries I’d been in.

 

In Boston, the unwritten rule is that you don’t make eye contact with another driver. Because the moment you do, you have acknowledged you’ve seen them which they take as permission to do as they please because it’s now your responsibility to avoid them.

 

In DC, you automatically yield to diplomatic plates regardless of right-of-way or rules of the road. Those guys have immunity and know it. You also avoid the people shaving or applying mascara in their rearview mirror or the people with a hardback book propped up on their steering wheel in 35 mph bumper to bumper traffic at o’dark early in the morning (true story).

 

In Spain, I was told that if you had a choice between hitting sheep or hitting a shepherd on a mountain road, it was in your best interest to hit the shepherd. You would only pay compensation for him once, where with the sheep you would pay for the generations of offspring it might have. Dehumanizing advice but there it was.

 

In rural Mississippi and Alabama, Georgia and Florida, you don’t go too fast or too slow, never mind cross the center line or even the outer lane marker unless you looking for a rather expensive ticket in places like Meridian, Madison, Marietta or Raiford. Basically, you don’t drive in these places with out-of-state, or sometimes out-of-county plates. Or on I-95 in the 80s or 90s much south of Jacksonville or much north of Miami if you are driving while black.

 

In rural one-track roads in Scotland, it was a race to see who could to get to the pull-off first and let the other driver by. In Wales, you just had to be mindful not to flip the three-cylinder car on the tight, wet, mountain corners that most English drivers took at speed. In England, you could easily get stuck on a roundabout like Charlie on the MTA.

 

And that’s without ending up facing a car weaving toward you in your lane on a well-lighted divided road after midnight on Halloween until you ditch for the median with palm to horn like an air raid siren which goes unheeded in the blur of alcohol trailing the car that passes you by (true story). But I expect that could be a holiday tradition in any US city or town, not just Seminole.

 

No, what fascinated me was how little time it took for the people I was with to adapt, or more revert, to the rules being off. Less than zero. Almost instantaneously, they drove like they were born to it. Using medians and breakdown strips as auxiliary traffic and passing lanes, Turning left from the right across three lanes of moving traffic, wedging a bumper between two vehicles with three horns harmonizing while curses and threats were issued in Spanish, English and some hybrid creole, complete with multicultural, international gestures in case anything got lost in translation.

 

I’d worked with most of these individuals long enough, and under similarly stressful circumstances, to understand that the situation would have been vastly different had stricter rules been on the table and enforced. For example, witnessing one of my compatriots sent home from Wallops Island after getting tagged by the installation police for doing over 100 mph across a bridge into the facility when he thought no one was around, despite having been warned that federal cops have absolutely no sense of humor for that. Or any of a myriad of rules most of us might consider polite, social conventions that I witnessed in the lab when they knew there would be no repercussions as I discussed in Switching Sides.

 

The rules they followed, the rules almost all people in such circumstances follow, is the example set by leadership, the rules and conventions their leaders and peers choose to accept or enforce, not the rules on the books. And when that leadership is absent or turns a blind eye, they consider all other rules to be optional. In this case, ambiguous or ambivalent rules, ones generally long adhered to and ingrained in other circumstances, were turned off like switch, despite what it might mean to the safety of those around them, or the public welfare in general. Aggressive behavior that only benefits the individual over defensive behavior that benefits everyone.

 

Which is what we saw much of last year with our pandemic response, from our president to our governor to a county commissioner, as they all drove home their “liberate” politics fed by a well-coordinated disinformation campaign, whether on masks, vaccines, or voting.

 

Generally, I don’t have a problem with people making their own decisions. If they want to commit slow or even fast suicide, that’s pretty much is a personal choice. People make bad decisions all the time. They drink, they smoke, they overeat, they engage in other risky behaviors that we, as a society, usually end up paying for one way or another.

 

Where I do have a problem is when those behaviors directly endanger others. Or when those decisions are based on orchestrated disinformation and conspiracy theories, especially for personal or economic gain. It may be your right to smoke. It’s not your right to promote smoking as health benign or nonaddictive, or market it to kids. It’s not your right to deny its links to cancer. It’s not your right to smoke in public spaces, or even certain enclosed private spaces, and endanger others with your choice, thus denying them their own. Just as it’s not your right to spread a disease during a pandemic that can absolutely collapse everyone’s healthcare system to where even getting routine emergency care becomes a roll of loaded dice. Ask Italy how that went. Or ask Brazil.

 

And specious economic arguments about the increased cost and inconvenience of getting your dog’s anal glands expressed don’t really stack up well with me against over half a million dead (true story). Especially when falling out of the mouth of a political leader during a public meeting. Especially a Q-Anon spouting elected official who stood firmly against any mandated response, public or private.

 

A few weeks ago, we had a technician from a company we’ve used before out to check our AC. By that point we’d both been vaccinated with enough time for full effectiveness. As had our tech, as it turned out. But when he arrived, all three of us were wearing masks. For us, that was as much providing a good example as well as gauging a stranger’s comfort level and circumstances before deciding how to proceed forward. For him because it was still company policy. This was just after our governor had rescinded all the local mask mandates despite our state still having the highest number of daily cases in the country.

 

After a brief exchange of information, we all decided going maskless was ok. But we still maintained social distance. And yet, had the tech said he would prefer the masks, we would have honored that even in our own home.

 

He then related that when the mask mandates first came out, he hated them. Absolutely hated them. He hated wearing the mask but did because he had to, both because his employer and the county required it. But sometime over the intervening year, he not only became more comfortable with his mask, he now had trouble setting it aside even where he could, places like restaurants and grocery stores.

 

Some of that was from the stark reminders of his boss’s twentysomething son getting hospitalized from his infection, and having a high school friend die from the disease back in Indiana. Either way, the intervening time had integrated and ingrained both the necessity and prudence of wearing a mask to him. And yet, I strongly suspect from his initial reaction, he would not have worn one without the county or corporate mandate.

 

The lesson I took away from all this is that people take a lot of time to get used to new rules, but very little time to rules being removed unless absolutely required by threat of consequences. When left to their own devices, people follow the example of those around them, especially those they trust.

 

Trust is a funny thing. It’s not based on information or intelligence, although it is sometimes based on experience, rarely on expertise. And sometimes that trust is situational and transactional. In the case of driving Puerto Rico, my coworkers trusted that the locals knew what they were doing (or more knew what they could get away with) and imitated them. We are truly primate children who play follow-the-leader instinctively.

 

Trust is the underpinning of all modern society and social interaction. We generally couldn’t live as close to each other as we do without at least a modicum of trust that certain social conventions will apply. Laws are a matter of trust that we will all be better off obeying them, and trust that the minority who refuse will be caught and punished (at least in American justice). Even our entire concept of money is entirely based on trust and always has been.

 

But social norms are also self-perpetuating even when people can see and understand that the situation as it stands is neither ideal nor in everyone’s, or even anyone’s, self-interest. Once you start down that road, it is very difficult to find your way back. Which is why it’s important never to let things get that far out of hand.

 

It’s an abject lesson in the practical realities of unrestrained libertarianism. Without rules, without leaders who provide and reinforce a positive example, without enforcement, people only do the right thing through the lens of enlightened self-interest at best. And that’s being generous.

 

So, where we’ve been in 2020 came as no surprise to me. Or with the Insurrection of 2021, where we’re going. I’ve said before, this represents a fundamental failure of leadership. Or in the case of the past several years, a calculated subversion. It’s a Machiavellian tactic we’ll see again and again until the political environment or public tolerance changes.

 

One of the house rules we had in friendly games of Machiavelli, a game of conquest and unification in Renaissance Italy, was that you could always call to see someone’s sheet when they were reading out their orders. Misrepresenting the orders you had written was not encouraged but was not strictly against the rules if you thought you could get away with it. The heart of the game is about negotiations, and all negotiations are based on trust. Trust you are being honest. Trust you will keep your word.

 

Sowing distrust, and exploiting the resulting chaos, is a common strategy with poor or inexperienced Machiavelli players. They think they’ll score an easy victory, but in reality, unless they are very good and very circumspect about how and when to use that tactic, it’s the quickest way to lose. Or at least ensure that no one wins.

 

And sometimes that’s the only point.

 

 

© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III

Problems I Can Solve - Beltane 2021

 

Throughout the past year of pandemic isolation and political turmoil, I have watched what friends are doing to occupy their time. While some are throwing themselves into their careers or avocations (making movies, writing books, setting up emergency communication networks, crocheting king-sized blankets from thread-weight yarn, working for social justice, or just plain working), I have been wargaming.

 

Most people will view this as merely one step up from devouring an industrial-sized bag of Funyuns while binge-watching entire seasons of Californication days on end, which was my other option. Given my choice was between that, going full-frontal prepper by breaking ground on an improvised fallout shelter on the porch (fully stocked with Funyuns as emergency rations and trade goods), and curling up into a fetal fugue state, I think I made the right choice. Writing was largely off the table for me. As I’ve said before, I need to feel marginally safe to write fiction. I was lucky to post the pieces I did last year.

 

Normally, reading would be my go-to form of escapism. Except for a two-month dead zone over the summer, I leaned heavily on that. I lost count of the number of books I read last year. Somewhere south of forty, I think. Fewer than my wife, which is unusual. The problem with reading during stressful times for me is that when a book is difficult or slow, as several of the ones I picked were, my mind drifts back to the three-card monte game above.

 

Some people will ask why wargames, not video games, boardgames or roleplaying games. Well, roleplaying games generally require more than two people to create a satisfying experience. They also consume a great deal of my bandwidth to setup. While I have run successful campaigns during stressful times, including while working mandatory overtime, in general the issue with this kind of creativity is similar to writing: it requires a minimum psychological standard for being marked as safe.

 

Similarly, the sweet-spot for players in most boardgames I find interesting is between three and five. Neither boardgames nor roleplaying games are conducive to being run over Zoom or Facetime, not that I detected much interest in the Kitten*Con crowd anyway. And boardgame runs are generally short, a couple hours to a day at best. I was looking for something more immersive.

 

Video games can fall closer to what I’m looking for but come with a host of other limitations. Most of the games I’ve enjoyed run on hardware and/or operating system that are several generations old. In publication terms, they would be considered out-of-print. The current generation of games has shifted in a direction I don’t find as appealing. The kind I do enjoy aren’t being developed for the platforms I’m on. While I have had fun with a couple straight-up video games last year, many center around physical reflex challenges that have never been my forte. For me, those are likely to induce more frustration than they relieve. In competitive games, the native AI often suffers in single player mode. Playing online against strangers would likely drive me back to the bunker option above. Plus, even in the best of times there is still the problem of scheduling, which is a constant challenge with anything involving two or more adults. And there is nothing like playing against a live opponent as they constantly surprise you.

 

All of which led me back to wargames.

 

First, let me clear up a few misconceptions about wargaming. The largest being that it is an exclusively testosterone-laden hobby geared to drooling, sloped foreheaded killers and JROTC military wannabes. Well, let’s take that one piece at a time.

 

While it is true that wargaming as we know it was born out of the Prussian military in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars through a game called Kriegspiel (literally wargame), over its two-century evolution, the hobby has attracted many non-military people into its ranks. Perhaps the best known is H. G. Wells, a devout and lifelong pacifist, who developed a set of miniatures wargame rules called Little Wars (“a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books”). As well, during the run-up to WWII, a series of sponsored naval wargames was run on the ballroom floor of an elite Manhattan hotel which was the place to be seen for many socialites who would never see the inside of a uniform, including many women. By the 1960s, the hobby had evolved into a favorite of college students, many of whom had no real desire to find themselves putting its principles into practice in the jungles of Vietnam.

 

Circling back to Wells’ perhaps somewhat problematic description of his own game above, let’s address the gender issue in the common perception of wargaming. Much like roleplaying games or the genre of science fiction, wargaming has never been an exclusively male avocation. Reviewing the subscription lists to wargaming magazines, as well as letters to the editors, reveals an approximately 10% female demographic of players and readers going back decades. The current evidence points to perhaps as high as 20%. That can go to nearly 50% if you examine the class composition of one of the very few Master’s levels wargame simulations design courses offered in a university (for the likes of people wanting to work for the RAND corporation).

 

Male wargamers often complain about the dearth of female players, but at the same time, they do not always create a welcoming environment for either female or minority opponents (again, much like roleplaying, science fiction or even STEM). The reality is there are female wargamers and female wargame designers. Hell, there are even award-winning transgender designers. Perhaps the best how-to-play video I’ve ever watched was created by a female former-servicemember for a C3i magazine game called Case Blue. Of course, I can no longer find that video on YouTube. Perhaps she grew weary of the marriage proposals sprinkled heavily through the comments. Which is a better alternative than the Gamergate harassment she could have suffered, a very real, and sometimes existential threat to women in the gaming community. The level of even casual sexism in male instructional and review videos is supremely depressing.

 

But the reality is that the wargaming community, like all hobby communities, is a continuum of many different types of people, from physical characteristics to socioeconomic backgrounds. Fitting all players into a single mold is like pounding off the corners of square pegs just to fit in someone’s desired round holes. It’s more than unproductive. Women wargame. Minorities wargame. LBGTQ people wargame. Pacifists and liberals wargame. Get used to it, or get out.

 

The only thing that matters much to me right now as far as a wargaming partner goes is that my wife is also interested in playing. She enjoys learning the history. She enjoys touring battlefields. She has a surprising competitive streak. She comes at the problems from a different angle. And having a gaming partner in the same household has made life easier (except maybe when she tells me, “I know where you sleep”). It’s something we enjoyed doing together even before the pandemic isolation. So, we continued.

 

The first quasi-wargame I played was Stellar Conquest (aka Stellar Confusion), a four-player, 4X strategy game which friends in high school introduced me to during my sophomore year. It incorporated economics, a multi-tiered technology track, hidden resources and movement, along with a simple combat system and an unofficial negotiation, all tracked by hand on a map with counters and concealed paper player sheets.

 

The first true two-player wargame I played was Panzer Blitz, which a different friend picked up when I was senior in high school. It is a classic hex and counter game set on the Eastern Front of Europe in WWII. My friend wanted to play the Germans, so I got to experience the Soviets. Which meant I got mauled pretty badly early on. The first scenarios do not favor Big Red.

 

My next foray was in college with another Avalon Hill game called Machiavelli, a multiplayer game of conquest set in Renaissance Italy (complete with tables for plague and famine) that focuses heavily on negotiation, similar to Diplomacy. This one featured hidden unit orders (ultimately executed simultaneously) again tracked with pencil and paper. This is a game we’ve planned entire weekends and cross-country vacations around so we could experience the full eight-player scenario, which is pretty wild.

 

When Karen and I moved to Maryland, where initially we didn’t know many people who shared our tastes in roleplaying, we set out to learn Squad Leader. A friend in college had a copy which we played a couple times before I picked it up. At the moment I bought it, it was one of the most complex games on the market. Like many modern video games, the rulebook walked you through a series of twelve scenarios, each one of which introduced a new section of rules so you could get a handle on them without being completely overwhelmed. So, one scenario might tackle morale and rallying, another tanks, another offboard artillery and spotting, another radios and flamethrowers, etc. I think we made it through seven or eight scenarios.

 

Then for a long time, we set the hobby down. Roleplaying was our first love in gaming, so we spent what time we had organizing groups that ran in multiyear campaigns of AD&D, Traveller and Aftermath.

 

Fast forward to somewhere around 2018. For my 50^th birthday, a friend had given me a $100 bill, something I had never held in my hand before. For whatever reason, I didn’t spend it right away. Because the gift was special to me, I wanted to buy something special with it. By then, our roleplaying group had floundered as most of our friends adulting schedules made coordinating impossible. Somewhere along the line, I had rekindled my interest in wargaming. I was at a point in my life where I needed to refocus on things that gave me joy. Poking around, I ran across C3i, a wargaming magazine that primarily supports GMT wargames. Each issue includes a fully developed minigame, often with a subset of rules from a larger, more complex game. That struck me as an interesting way to try out a more expensive game before buying it.

 

So, I used that gift money to pick up three back issues on Amazon. Included were games called Plan Orange (a speculative US-Japan naval war in the 1930s based on Empire of the Sun), South Pacific (also based on Empire of the Sun, centered around the campaign at Guadalcanal), and the Battle of Wakefield (a War of the Roses battle based on the Men of Iron series). Soon after, I picked up Case Blue (the WWII Stalingrad offensive based on the rules of Unconditional Surrender: Europe). The following year, I picked up The Battle of Issy (the last battle of the Napoleonic Wars using the Jours de Gloire system).

 

Each game only took about a weekend to learn and play with rulesets of 10-12 pages, which by modern wargame standards are relatively short. Because the minigames were less intimidating, my wife once again joined me in playthroughs. We found them all interesting enough, and fun enough, that I ended up buying each of the larger games.

 

Emboldened by our success and having something enjoyable to occupy our weekends, I delved back into my small stash of wargames in the back closet. Among them I rediscovered one called Onward Christian Soldiers, a 2-7 player wargame with three scenarios and two rulesets that focus on the First through Third Crusades. Back when we were regularly traveling to the other coast each year to visit the parental units, I would stop at a game store in Orlando that I’d been frequenting since high school as a reward for surviving the excursion. On one of those trips, I’d spotted and indulged myself with this game. I had glanced it over once or twice but life got in the way of my fully diving into it.

 

For Christmas break that year, we decided we would learn and play the first scenario. Little did we know that this game had a well-earned reputation for not having the cleanest ruleset. It can be a frustrating experience trying to understand someone’s less than perfectly written or implemented set of rules, especially with a wargame. This game has two 32-page rulebooks (one for the First Crusade, a different one for the Second and Third) plus a 16-page Quick Start Guide and Playbook. They were generally poorly organized with multiple typos and contradictions due to inadequate editing and printing errors. In fact, there are pages and pages of errata and FAQs on Board Game Geek and Con Sim World (a wargaming support site). For years the developer threatened to incorporate the clarifications and corrections into a new edition of the rules but could never get the game designer onboard. I have a composition notebook for Onward filled with handwritten questions and eventual answers citing references (designer, developer, house rule, website, etc.).

 

Back in college, I heard the most complex wargame printed (at the time) was called Third Reich. As you might guess, it simulated WWII in Europe. The same friend owned it as owned Squad Leader but could never get anyone to play. At some point, I made a copy of the rules and eventually plowed my way through them. By the time I finished, my friend and I no longer lived in the same city never mind the same state but we did have a few opportunities to get together and discuss how the rules might work. Even though we never got to play, trying to understand the rules was a kind of challenge, as much to see whether the game had potential (it did) as to play it.

 

That experience served me well with Onward Christian Soldiers.

 

Because in the end, despite all its creakiness, Onward is an oddly fascinating and fantastic game to play. By the end of our Christmas break, both my wife and I found ourselves huddled over the game table, plotting our next moves, throwing down cards and rolling dice to determine how our encounters played out, screaming “God wills it!” when fortune turned our way. Or whimpering that same phrase when fate and the dice abandoned us. We had a blast. For all its issues, this is still one of our go-to wargames.

 

Fast forward again to the pandemic. By now, we had more rulesets under our belt. We’d played through Arquebus which was the latest installment of Men of Iron. We’d played through over half a dozen battles of the Napoleonic Wars in Jours de Gloire, including Waterloo. We’d played through Battle Hymn: Gettysburg and Pea Ridge. We’d played through Putin Strikes (the gods only know why) and heavily modified it with house rules to make it enjoyable. We’d played through At Any Cost: Metz 1870 (another go-to game). We’d even given a go to MBT (Main Battle Tank), a Cold War US-USSR simulation with a 75-page rulebook and slightly shorter Playbook.

 

During the initial lockdown, we opted to play the four main battles of Napoleon’s Last 100 Days (Quatre Bras, Ligny, Wavre and Waterloo), complete with an introductory review video and updates posted on a Facebook page we created. After a long break over the summer for reasons discussed in other essays and an abortive attempt at playing Little Bighorn (too grindy but maybe deserves a second chance), we held a two-person Kitten*Con: Covid Edition which featured a couple minigames that eased us back into playing again. That ended with us taking up Case Blue as a warmup for Unconditional Surrender: Europe with its 56-page Rulebook and equally long Playbook, and surprisingly little errata.

 

Unconditional Surrender has hundreds of counters on two map sheets that take up our entire gaming table, and requires two auxiliary TV trays for the three faction mobilization cards plus the top of a game cabinet for counter storage and a pair of compact dice rolling towers. Even that barely contains this monster of a game into the space we have. At the peak of the January wave of Covid, we walked through several training scenarios then embarked on the full war, which we finished about a month later, playing nearly every day. We even spent our January stimulus checks on new gaming chairs. Wargaming was back on the menu, boyos.

 

All of which left me wondering, how was it that I could focus on reading, integrating and digesting dozens of pages of rules when I couldn’t really sit down to write? What was it about this hobby that was so captivating where other forms of escapism had failed?

 

I mean, I have never been in the military. I don’t like air shows. I don’t like cars shows or boat shows. I don’t really like fireworks. I’m not into guns or gadgetry, any of which you might expect. I view tools as tools, not as lists of specifications to be drooled at or debated over beers. I guess I am not a typical guy in that regard.

 

But I am still an engineer at heart. I am the guy who looked forward to the logic problems in crossword puzzle books as a kid. I am the guy who enjoyed word problems in school. I am the guy who liked diagramming sentences in English. I am still the guy who does his own taxes every year, so poorly written instructions leave me undaunted. I am the guy who took boundary value problems in college as an elective. So, complex problems are not particularly intimidating, at least when there are rules and instructions to help me forge my way through. And I also am the guy who can quote 6-sided (and even 10-sided) dice probabilities in my sleep. I was born under the sign of a bell curve.

 

What I am not good at is people. Ok, that’s not strictly true. I do pretty well at judging people’s motivations and intents, and intuitively gauging how certain social scenarios might play out. But it’s something I don’t particularly enjoy. I picked it up as a survival skill from growing up in an unstable environment, then honed it in a Machiavellian workplace. Decades of roleplaying helped. As did spinning out oddly interlinked and little understood scenarios for a post-apocalypse roleplaying game called Aftermath sometimes based on classified information gleaned from public sources.

 

So, when I was faced with a real-life scenario that both experience and intuition screamed at me was perhaps an existential threat in the twin avatars of a pandemic and social/political unrest, my first priority was to contingency plan. The problem I faced was Rumsfeldian. It wasn’t the known knowns or the unknown knowns or even the known unknowns that bothered me. Those I mostly knew how to deal with. It was the unknown unknowns. The black swans if you will, at least one of which had already occurred in the pandemic itself.

 

This series of knowns and unknowns wove a complex web of problems. Some were straightforward. By a year ago, we knew there would be lockdowns, either structured or self-organized, but we didn’t know how long they would last. We knew we should wear masks but didn’t know how effective they would be. We knew people were working on a vaccine, but didn’t know if or when one might be available or how effective it would be. We knew there would be shortages be we didn’t know of what or for how long.

 

Because people are people, we knew there would be hoarding. While some items made sense pretty quickly (masks, hand sanitizer, cleaning products), others took some digging to figure out (toilet paper, meat), a few only made sense in hindsight (freezers, exercise equipment), while some never made much sense at all except as self-fulfilling prophecy (ammunition, emergency rations). But at least people were taking the pandemic seriously if somewhat haphazardly.

 

We also knew there would be economic impacts, but didn’t know the depth or breadth of the downturn and how it would impact us. Not an ideal situation with my wife having retired less than a year before. A nightmare scenario for order of returns (a key component of the American retirement system), never mind for the friends and relatives suddenly thrown out of work.

 

We also knew it was an election year, but we didn’t know exactly how that would play into the crisis. We knew we had erratic leadership, but didn’t appreciate exactly how erratic (enough that it cost a sitting President an election). We knew there was a ton of misinformation out there, but didn’t know the extent to which it was organized and orchestrated for political gain.

 

Because of all that we knew people would get sick, that people would die, and that this country was not prepared or equipped to prevent the bulk of that from happening. From 1918, we knew those infections and deaths would likely come in waves.

 

What we didn’t know was whether the healthcare system would fully collapse (as it almost did in NYC). We didn’t know that over the summer the country would see some of the largest spontaneous civil rights demonstrations and unrest since the 1960s. We didn’t know that armed and organized right-wing groups would attempt to kidnap a sitting governor with the intent of publicly executing her to further their “liberate” agenda.

 

In short, we didn’t know exactly how far social cohesion might break down.

 

Although I suspected and predicted that the combination of social stresses, societal trends, and sociopathic leadership would lead to violence, I did not know exactly what form that might take (spoiler alert: it wasn’t the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man). Like, say, whether Q-Anon, the 3-Percenters, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys would forge an unholy alliance and attempt a full-on insurrection at the Capitol with encouragement from a lame-duck President who had yet to concede defeat (spoiler alert: they did).

 

That just scratches the surface of the constellation of problems that occupied my mind, the list of which grew throughout the year. The country was at a confluence of events, some of which had been decades in the making, some of which had sprung up overnight. Most of which, either known or unknown, were out of my hands to solve or resolve. There were actions I could take to protect us on a small scale but precious little I could do to influence the larger outcome. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Which is what I focused on until my personal life went off the rails in June. But even then, I continued garnering information and monitoring the situation.

 

But my capacity to initiate change was quickly overwhelmed. I spent a lot of time waiting to see how the scenario unfolded, incorporating models into a lot of multi-branched decision trees, with a lot of contingency plans depending which path they took. Suddenly, I found my personal Venn diagram between reality and wargaming significantly overlapped.

 

At their core, all wargames are simulations. They are instructional tools for orderly quantifying and understanding complex problems set in chaotic environment. At both the professional and the amateur/hobby level, they teach a particular set of skills. Organization. Objectives. Supply. Situational Awareness. Surveying the terrain for strengths and weaknesses. Evaluating a position, yours or someone else’s. Spotting a vulnerability. Recognizing an opportunity. Planning, and because no plan survives first contact, contingency planning.

 

If engineering fundamentally teaches you how to solve a problem and how to read a book, and science teaches you how to evaluate data and how to confirm a pattern, and art teaches you how to see and how to control your hands, then wargaming teaches you how to organize and how to adapt. Or perhaps a little of all those things. But only with practice, practice, practice. Like any skill, it needs to be sharpened so that it operates smoothly under stress.

 

So, while I couldn’t develop a vaccine, or heal hundreds of years of racial inequity overnight, or dyke the spring tide of conspiracy theories, I knew how to spur Murat into a charge and collapse an Austrian flank at Montebello. I knew how to patiently hold the key villages around Mars-La-Tour even with only degraded French forces until the relentless Prussian assault ground down. I knew how to get Italian formations moving across the river at Fornovo to engage and scatter the idle French. I knew control of the fortress at Antioch was the key to success or failure in the First Crusade. I knew that if the Japanese could seize and hold Port Moresby, the entire American Guadalcanal offensive might collapse.

 

And what I didn’t know, I could learn. I could distract my mind from fixating ineffectually on the problems of the present by unleashing upon it the problems of the past. So instead of waking up in the middle of the night worrying about some possible event I couldn’t change, I could set my mind to how to launch an effective surprise attack to disrupt and delay a Soviet summer offensive in 1943, and prevent the collapse of the entire Eastern Front. I could review force dispositions in my mind, moving them this way or that based on what I remembered. I could consider what units might be transferred from other theaters to improve the outcome, and whether that would strip those defenses too far back when the Western allies invaded. If need be, I could get up, turn on a light, study the map, consult the rules, calculate the odds, determine how to improve the probabilities, and devise a plan that might or might not pass muster come daylight. And with that problem solved, at least until the next morning, I could get back to sleep.

 

Once my plan was put to the test, I could immerse myself in a language of tables and modifiers, of dice rolls and simple mathematics, of the probabilities of success and failure, of adaptation to the truth on the ground as the encounters unfolded. Of the satisfaction of well executed plan that accomplishes its objectives. Or the sudden anxiety of attempting to salvage an untenable position on the fly when it doesn’t.

 

As I played, time and reality slipped away. The noise of daily life faded to the background. Just one push might make the difference in an offensive. The risk of one more airstrike by the Luftwaffe, of one more panzer army committed to the attack, of creating and exploiting one more breech even if it thinned out my defenses. Of one more sketchy Italian ally plugging a hole in a suddenly tenuous line where only it can hold back an inexhaustible red tide of infantry if only for another month, another turn, another night. Until I could reset and recompose a new midnight gospel master plan for that cardboard ballet of uncertainty which continued to uncoil accompanied by both Heisenberg and Schrodinger singing impromptu arias. You can predict either the position or the momentum of your offensive but not both with the same precision until your turn fully plays out. That critical panzer army at the point of your attack is both alive and dead until the dice settle into their final position, revealing its fate.

 

And if none of the planning worked? If Fortuna did not smile in my favor? If I misread the transition between aggression pays and conservatively consolidating a position that inexplicably collapsed? If I risked a bridge too far in a moment of no guts, no glory emotion? Well, it was simple enough to reset the board and try again. And again. And again, if necessary. Until the contours of the problem of that scenario were fully understood. Until I got it right.

 

If nothing else, this past year has reinforced the opportunity to apply those lessons to my everyday life.

 

Things like understanding that long-term strategy and accumulated odds of success are directly applicable to retirement planning. That sticking to the plan to see how it plays out is important but so is adapting it when the unexpected happens. That spotting and seizing a no-guts-no-glory investment opportunity, however fleeting, is often the key to financial success.

 

Or applying Machiavelli negotiating skills, with the right blend of gathered intelligence, perceived mutual interests and veiled threats (or if necessary, flashing a metaphorical assassin’s dagger), is critical when dealing with the recalcitrance of the city or the county, a middling to major corporation, or rival organizations and teams at work. That building alliances, sometimes with unreliable allies, is often the only way to achieve your overall objectives.

 

Or learning enough about logistics to build a running, rotating stock of essential supplies during a pandemic, including from nontraditional sources that deliver on Easter Sunday. That a vaccine being 95% effective translates to a 1 in 20 chance that it won’t be, that mask’s effectiveness of 83% translates to a 1 in 6 chance that it isn’t. And exactly how those odds play out in real-world rolls, and how to evaluate the risk/reward implications should one of those rolls fail.

 

Or even gleaning information on the availability of guns and ammunition from key websites to calculate the likelihood of violence. Or if necessary, being able to set up a defensible position behind the rock in front of the house with firing lanes that cover the main approaches should it happen that some of the armed and dangerous, batshit crazy Proud Boys instigating the Capitol insurrection had infiltrated and occupied my own neighborhood (spoiler alert: one was captured by the FBI a few blocks away).

 

Like a purported Chinese curse, we live in interesting times.

 

Which is why until time and chance return us to some semblance of normality, you will find me at the gaming table, working through problems I can solve. Because the day-to-day surreality of this life grows increasingly beyond my ken.

 

 

© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III

The Dead - Spring Equinox 2021

 

In the midst of a global pandemic that has claimed over half a million Americans lives, I have been thinking a lot about the dead. One of whom at least peripherally is mine.

 

Nearly nine years ago, I sat listening as my father died. Two days earlier, I had received a call. He needed me to come over right away. Hospice was on site and they wanted someone there to help take care of his wife until her son could arrive when the inevitable happened. My stepsister-in-law had assumed that duty until she had suddenly departed a few weeks earlier for reasons I wouldn’t learn until I had a chance to speak with her after she came back with my stepbrother.

 

A few hours after I got there, my father slipped into unconsciousness, to return only once and only briefly. The hospice nurse said this was pretty typical. He was waiting for someone to take over responsibility so he could let go. I only had a couple hours to talk to him and confirm his arrangements and final wishes, which included cancelling my sister’s longstanding debt to the estate at my request. It didn’t benefit me (in fact it cost me), but did make life easier for my stepbrother. He would have had to enforce it, which would have been less than pleasant.

 

Over the intervening two days, I spent a great deal of time on the phone updating distant family. My aunt had already said her goodbyes to my father months before, and sadly parted on less than perfect terms, although not as bad as my stepsister-in-law. I talked to my stepsister-in-law and got increasingly evasive answers about the timing of their arrival which I only later understood.

 

I stressed to my sister that if she wanted to see our father before he died, she didn’t have much time. I was being told days at most. Theirs was yet another in a string of dysfunctional relationships within my immediate family. And yet, if she’d said the word, I would have moved heaven and earth to make sure she would have gotten to see him. I knew how to make that happen. I knew it might be important to her later. She declined to come, a decision I think she would later regret.

 

The next two days were kind of surreal. I had never witnessed anyone die before. Hospice told us exactly what to expect, down to the physical changes to look for that said the end was imminent. But they stressed that these were only indicators; they didn’t provide an absolute timeline. There are no hard and fast rules with dying, just strongly coincident trends. So, we waited as we listened to my father’s breathing change and watched his fingernails turn increasingly blue.

 

Because of the layout of the condo, hospice had set up his hospital bed in the living room, just by the sliding glass door that looked out onto the lagoon. Between that and having at least one and sometimes two hospice nurses there, along with my stepmother plus the two of us, his dying felt public, like he was on display. I am certain he felt that, too, from our final, brief conversation.

 

To give my stepmother as much privacy as possible, my wife and I spent most of our time either in the breakfast nook off the kitchen, where I reviewed a proposal for adapting a story of mine, or in my father’s spare bedroom office sorting and arranging all the documents my stepbrother might need later. He was the primary executor on the will and on the trust. He would be responsible for what happened to his mother, although she and my father had come to an agreement on what that would be. Because of her own long-term health conditions, she was unable to take care of herself so was unable to stay in the condo. She would die in a facility in Missouri less than three months after my father.

 

None of which really mattered when his final moments came. The previous evening, the night nurse had given us the heads up that the end was very near, under twenty-four hours. She would wake us if he began to change. He didn’t before the next morning when the day shift nurse took over and the unit supervisor showed up. They both reaffirmed the night nurse’s assessment. He wouldn’t be among the living much longer.

 

By nine that morning, all we could do was watch, wait and listen. My stepmother in her recliner, facing my father’s bed. My wife and I on a couch along the opposite wall, facing her. The hospice staff at the bar by the kitchen, trying to be discrete and give us what distance they could while staying close enough to witness and log his death when it happened.

 

The TV wasn’t on, which was unusual for my stepmother. It was May in Florida which meant the windows were shut because it was by then AC weather. Off and on my stepmother would get up and walk over to peer down at my father without saying anything, then return to her chair. For a short time, I sat by him and whispered reassurances that it was ok if he wanted to let go, and other words I will not share. The hospice nurses told us that he may or may not be able to hear us, even in unconsciousness. Near death experiences indicate hearing lasts until the very end, even after all other senses fail. I don’t think I was the right person to comfort him, but I was the one there.

 

For a long time, no one spoke. There was nothing to be said and really nothing to be done. We were all waiting for the next phase of the process which we knew couldn’t happen until after he was dead. Then we knew there would be a flurry of activity, the official parts of which, like contacting the mortician for pickup and assisting in getting a death notice in the paper, the hospice workers would handle. I knew I had a number of phone calls to make and had to plot out the proper order of who to call first, and who to ask to pass the information to who else down the chain to avoid as many hurt feelings as I could.

 

But that would come later. At that moment, we sat in an eerie silence broken only by one of us occasionally shifting position and my father’s increasingly ragged breath. At some point, I realized that we were all purposefully still, frozen, anticipating. Somewhere in those final minutes, I started counting the seconds between his breaths, which got longer and longer as time wore on. First a second, then two, then five, then ten. Each intervening pause of silence eventually interrupted by another sometimes sharp, sometimes struggling, sometimes almost startled intake of breath. I think the last pause I counted was twenty before the hospice supervisor called his death. By then, her words came as a relief.

 

Because I had been beside him when that moment of transition came, I never had any trouble accepting my father’s death. While I had some unresolved issues, as most people do, I understood he’d had his time to say anything he wanted to say to me. He never did. But I didn’t dwell on it as we both had our opportunity. In the end, of his own two kids, and his wife’s two, I was the one he called to take responsibility. The youngest of the four. The one he knew would go to bat for his wife with anyone against anything no matter what happened. I guess to me, while that didn’t say everything, it said enough. As I talked about in “Dead? Dead.” it took my stepmother a little longer to process his death, which, while completely surreal at the time, was not abnormal, especially for someone in her situation.

 

All of which came into sharp relief last spring.

 

Just before my wife’s birthday, I received a phone call from my sister. My mother was dead. She had been dead for an indeterminate period of time, which turned out to be just over two days as the hospital searched their records for any point of contact. Neither my mother nor her caregivers had given one when she’d been admitted to the hospital. No one had called to let either my sister or I know. No one had called any of her local friends.

 

Two months earlier, my mother had stopped answering my calls. I suspect because she mistook my concern for her well-being and my inquires as to whether she was getting everything she needed during the pandemic lock-down as “checking up on her”, an accusation she’d leveled during another health crisis eight years earlier, at the same time my father was dying, when she was in and out of the hospital and rehab on a bi-monthly basis. Our relationship had always been complicated. By this point, I would categorize it as somewhat estranged.

 

With the pandemic, as well as for other reasons, I didn’t help clear out her apartment. So, I didn’t have that stark marker as a confirmation of her death. I only had the initial silence followed by a series of increasingly agitated and recriminatory phone calls from my sister. Another complicated and strained familial relationship.

 

Three years earlier my sister had fought tooth and nail to become the executor of my mother’s estate to the point of subverting even the people who tried to help her make that happen. When the time came, she refused to take it up. By then I was in no position to. But I went out of my way to share all the information I had with her, and guide her as best I could, and then legally resigned any interest in my mother’s estate in favor of her. When things had started to slip sideways with my father’s estate, I had offered to do the same with my stepbrother so my sister would get a full share. Which in hindsight strikes me as equal parts misplaced loyalty and an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.

 

Or maybe it was just part of my unique grieving process, in both cases for something more than just losing a parent, some of which had happened decades earlier. The loss of a childhood, the loss of a family, the loss of any possibility of salvaging any of that, the loss of any possibility of acknowledgement of who I was or what I’d become. The loss of any and all illusion. All the remained was the present slipping moment by moment into a troubled, murky past.

 

Either way, when my sister became so upset by having my mother’s ashes physically near her because she thought they were cursed or possessed and couldn’t deal with them, I told her to mail them to me. Not exactly what I wanted, but not new territory for me either. My stepbrother had sent me my father’s and my stepmother’s ashes eight years before because he and his brother didn’t know what to do with them, and thought I might. So, I knew how to handle it.

 

Accordingly, as we’d done with the other two before, my wife and I scattered my mother’s ashes in an appropriate spot and wrote up a description of what we had done for my sister, my aunt and cousins, and my mother’s few remaining friends, and took a couple of pictures. By then, stealth burials had become a tradition in my family. It seems like that should have laid the matter to rest for me.

 

But it didn’t.

 

I have spent a great deal of the intervening time convincing myself that my mother was really dead. Some of that faded briefly when I scattered her ashes. Watching what remains of a cremated human body pour out from a container is a visceral experience. But it is also abstract. A couple pounds of certified and tagged ash and pulverized bone fragments do not have the same gravity as a body. Intellectually, I knew they were her, that there was no vast conspiracy in which she could still be alive. And yet, below the surface, my mind wasn’t quite ready to accept that my situation had changed. That something I had dreaded for many years had come to pass, and that everything would be ok. In that moment, I wasn’t sure it would be, for reasons that would take a great deal of mental energy to sort out. Energy, which at that moment, I just didn’t have.

 

And due to the very strange nature of that act during the pandemic lock-down, that niggling feeling didn’t fully go away. I still found myself having to reiterate in an internal monologue that she was dead. I don’t think that’s because I was closer to her than my father. I wouldn’t say I was by the end. I don’t even think that it was fully because I was still afraid of her, though that certainly played a part. I think more it had to do with having witnessed my father die where my mother’s death was more remote both physically, mentally and temporally by the way the situation unfolded.

 

That reaction surprised me.

 

When my wife’s father died just over a year ago, her mother was somewhat insistent that she return home for the viewing so that she wouldn’t have trouble accepting it. As there was no way my wife was going to sit beside her unrepentant brother and pretend nothing had happened between them, or with the rest of her family, for even two hours of a visitation and viewing, that was never going to happen. As well, she had said her goodbyes the last time she had seen her father alive. So, she didn’t need to see him again with her own eyes to confirm that he was dead. She’d already set that picture in her mind.

 

I was fortunate enough to have done the same with each of my grandparents, so I knew what that feeling was like. There is closure in setting a final image in your mind beforehand, as I had with both of my mother’s parents the last time that I had seen them together, and then the last time I’d seen my grandfather alone. I’d done the same with my father’s parents, separated by a dozen years. I’d attended all their memorials, three of which involved trips north that I never want to take again by the way the family dynamics played out. Instead of reinforcing good memories of my grandparents, these trips fostered more familial trauma. I completely understood my wife’s refusal to do the same. Instead, she visited her mother several days after everyone else had left. Which, by the way, is something many grief counselors encourage to keep the situation from getting overwhelming for a new widow or widower.

 

As you can tell from some of the above, at the best of times death can be a messy business despite its mechanisms being pretty straightforward and simple. It’s complicated by we the living. The ones left behind. The ones who may or may not be able to confront the idea that everyone we know, everyone we’ve ever known, will eventually leave us behind. Unless we leave them first. Never mind our being willing to confront our own mortality.

 

Which may be why the rites surrounding death are some of the earliest human rituals that set us apart from other primates, and in general from all but a handful of other mammals. There is a primal mystery surrounding death, one which other species don’t appear to dwell on, or at least not to the extent that we do.

 

When we’ve had cats die, we have left out their bodies on the porch for a little while before we buried them in a kind of viewing to allow their housemates to see that they are gone. Usually, the living cautiously approach and sniff the dead, then look at us with a certain expression that is hard to interpret, and don’t go back. Only a handful who were very close to the dead call for their missing companion at night for some period of time, where they never called before. None have really searched the house to see where their friend had gone. It’s hard to know exactly what they are thinking or what they really understand. Something, from what I’ve seen.

 

Perhaps people aren’t much different. We just have more elaborate social ceremonies to help our fellows cope.

 

Different cultures have different customs regarding death. In some societies only outsiders are allowed to handle the dead. In others, only family. Preparing the dead is universal, especially washing and dressing or wrapping the body. Standing vigil over it until it can be buried, cremated or otherwise disposed of. Laying it to rest with treasured possessions, perhaps for use in an afterlife, perhaps just to honor their spirit or to keep them happy. We often mark the place we lay them to rest, sometimes with stones or shrines or other symbols, other times by using a sacred communal burial ground or just noting a private location in our minds. In modern western society, we send correspondence and make phone calls to notify friends and family of what has happened. We sometimes take pictures to share with others who could not be present. For legal reasons, we advertise deaths in papers and other public forums.

 

But most of all, we gather. We open our homes to visitations, to comfort and to receive comfort from family and friends. We feed the mourners, recognizing some have come long distances to stand beside us. We hold services and memorials. We hold wakes, not to wake the dead, but to be alert or wakeful ourselves. The veil between worlds is open. We are uncertain what might slip through in either direction if we do not pay attention. We share poignant stories and memories of the dead while trying not to speak ill of them. For some because we feel the dead can no longer defend themselves, for others because we are quite afraid that they can. We lay out the dead for viewings in funeral parlors or churches or other public venues, or sometimes in our homes on dining room tables, so people can confirm reality for themselves.

 

Dead? Dead.

 

Although many may deny it, almost all these rites and rituals are intended for the living, not the dead. Funerals are for those left behind. One way or another, the dead are beyond caring. Many people will also tell you the horniest they’ve ever been is after a brush with death. Those documented and quite psychologically normal experiences are as intense and intimate as they feel inappropriate. Life reinforces life.

 

There is solid anthropological evidence for why many of these funerary rites exist. One predominant view is that they provide a coping mechanism to channel our individual grief and other often mixed emotions (relief, guilt, anger, fear, etc.). Another is that they reinforce social coherence through group bonding as we support each other in a time of shared pain.

 

That doesn’t always happen. Death brings out either the best or the worst in people. Often both. But without those ceremonial frameworks, I think worse is more likely than better. Without set societal expectations and guidance, things are more likely to get out of hand in stressful times. Death is difficult, a mental shock. The scars from the living often linger.

 

There also might be pragmatic reasons that our ancestors stumbled upon as they codified their practices. Primitive sanitation. Dead bodies aren’t generally healthy to be around after a short time. Unintended consequences. The lye from scattered ashes gets clothing down river cleaner, or even acts as a primitive disinfectant. Communal safety. Standing vigil might have started as simply as keeping dangerous scavengers at bay, either animal or human. Unless of course you favor sky burials. But even then, that feast is ritualized and out of plain sight.

 

The most intriguing explanation I’ve read is that burial or cremation began as an attempt to literally bury or destroy the evidence of death. The anthropologist who advocated it traces it back to sacrifice (making sacred) often through scapegoating (casting the community’s sins upon a person or a creature), then killing it or banishing it and making it divine. Which he believes channels our inherent human violence to prevent our strong tendency as primates to mimic violence with further violence in a destructively escalating cycle.

 

He contends that many of the earliest burial sites we’ve found through archeology house sacrificial victims. Once the dead were dead, early societies wanted to hide the evidence of the ritual to prevent reprisals from erupting. The one way to do that was to make the victims holy after the fact, so their sacrifice could be honored as benefiting the community at large.

 

There is a counterintuitive resonance point here. In popular Christian culture (not strictly doctrine or theology), our dead are transformed into angels, by any definition divine beings, who then reside in an unearthly paradise for eternity. It is not difficult to deconstruct that myth into a near universal concept of paradise being a reward for enduring the suffering of this mortal life, which serves as a coping mechanism. Again, in popular Christian culture, some of those angels watch over us and guide us, at least if we pay them the proper respect, like visiting their graves, offering them small sacrifices like flowers at various anniversaries, and remembering them at other important family social occasions like christenings or weddings. When you pull it apart, that’s an abstract form of ancestor worship which has been widespread throughout various world cultures at one point or another in their history.

 

Or, if you favor a slightly different view, some of those restless dead may attempt to enact revenge upon us as reprisals for the slights they suffered in life. They either use small, mischievous acts, or dire visitations in our dreams or during illness, mysterious times when the barrier between physical reality and the spirit world is lower. Like gremlins or the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Should these dead be particularly jealous of the life in which they can no longer partake, they may seek to seize us while our defenses are down. From that perspective, we celebrate them to remind them that we love them. We inter favored items with them to bribe them, to keep them content in their graves. Safely entombed in stone or underground. Or diluted in water. Or dispersed upon the wind.

 

Almost any way you look at it, anthropologically the dead are potentially fearful forces that most sane people have no wish to offend. Best to hide them away in their own special area, out of sight. Close enough to visit, far enough away that neither side is inclined to casually make the trip. Not grouped together in so large a congregation of graves that we can’t hold our breath as we pass them by to keep some opportunistic spirit from stealing into us.

 

As a species, we prefer to imagine that somehow this life continues beyond the transition into death. I won’t debate any particular religious belief except to say they are ubiquitous. Most of us would prefer to imagine at least some of our dead in a better, more restful place, at the very least free of pain, though a few we might like to see receive righteous punishment for their accumulated misdeeds. Heaven and hell. Or more benignly, circling back to continue learning and improving through reincarnation. Even the most atheistic among us sometimes like to imagine our atoms serving as building blocks in creating new life even if not through conventional reproduction.

 

In other words, we construct elaborate illusions in the name of psychological self-comfort. Humans rarely let our dead rest or even fully let them go. Many people visit their dead. Many more talk to them. In general, I don’t do the former but sometimes do the latter. Just as I also talk to quite (presumably) living people who are not here with me. Sometimes I argue with both kinds although they rarely have epiphanies.

 

I think sometimes we believe we will get finally get straight answers from the dead once they have been freed from their earthly biases. But in general, the dead keep their secrets. Dead men tell no tales, at least not willingly. I think if we get answers, it is more often in our dreams, and then only because of our intuition processing events that we often refuse to accept while awake. Or through years of psychologically intense counseling, which often amounts to much the same thing.

 

Perhaps in burying or cremating the dead, we are merely trying to conceal our own grief, our own pain, whatever form that might take. Humans, like all animals, avoid pain in almost any way they can. Sometimes to the point of self-delusion.

 

Which leads me back to acceptance.

 

As I said, it quite surprised me that I had to remind myself that my mother was dead until just recently. I hadn’t felt that at all with my father, my grandparents, my uncle, a friend’s mother who helped shape me, or the best man at my wedding. Sure, I’d felt sadness and a similar sense of loss with some. I missed our conversations and correspondence dearly in others. But I never had to remind myself the situation was real. Normally, I would expect part of that with my mother was old trauma resurfacing, except I know other people who have gone through the same with a much more stable family history. Although they often felt differently about their dead.

 

The closest I have come to the feeling I had was with several of our feline companions who died. I think because I interacted with them more day to day, and so had to get used to a new routine that did not include them where they had been nearly omnipresent before. But with all but one of them since we’ve been in this house, we had a physical body to view and enough time with it for the situation to set. In the one case we didn’t, we eventually received a credible report of his death from a neighbor. Although before we did, we had a pretty certain feeling he was dead.

 

Last spring was different. I think part of it certainly stemmed from the suddenness of my mother’s death. I think part, too, from the bizarreness of the circumstances, both leading up to her dying and of the broader virus lockdown, both of which consumed a great deal of my psychological bandwidth, both of which contributed to a feeling of distance and isolation. And then there were the living who would complicate the event going forward no matter what I did.

 

But honestly, I don’t think it was any of that. I think a lot more of it came down to expectations. With my father, there was never an expectation from him or from anyone else that I would help. He made it clear throughout his life that I was not the son he wanted. He said as much to me directly. So perhaps there was a modicum of redemption when he called me in the end, not any of the three other steps/siblings, not his sister. Maybe because that was an admission of me being somehow worthwhile. In doing so, he gave me the power to deny him, although I chose not to. I suspect he knew I wouldn’t and relied on it. I had stepped up before where others hadn’t. Or maybe I was just the last, best choice he had.

 

With my mother, there was always a sense of obligation, from her and from others in my family. An obligation I no longer felt, nor felt the need to live up to. And yet, when the moment came, she chose to inform none of us. Like a feral cat, she slunk away privately to die. That level of rejection is pretty difficult to comprehend or accept.

 

But that lack of acceptance, that having to remind myself she was dead, was not out of a particular sense of sadness or grieving. It came with a certain measure of freedom and relief. It wasn’t that I could never speak with her again, it was that I didn’t have to. I no longer had to dutifully send cards and gifts, or make phone calls and get admonished or rebuked for caring or for trying to do what was right, in spite of the consequences, in spite of what it cost me. That I wouldn’t ever receive her calls again after her choices had caused her life to slip sideways, when she expected me to bail her out. In the end those choices killed her, or at least significantly contributed to her death.

 

It took those months to realize that I could finally set her burden down. And a burden it had become.

 

With my mother, like my father, there were really no larger, unanswered questions. Both my parents made their positions clear over the fullness of time, through words and deeds. As had I. Theirs had not changed, nor had mine. With both of them, long before their deaths came, I had already begun to disengage, if only for my own psychological stability. In a way I hadn’t had to with more favored friends and family even when I knew their deaths were imminent.

 

And yet, I did the same for my mother as I had done for my father and my stepmother. I performed the final ritual of laying her remains to rest, if not for me for others who, while they couldn’t or didn’t want to directly be a part of it, I believe needed it on some level for their own acceptance and mental well-being. I wrote up what I’d done knowing the people I shared it with might want to feel included in some way, where I was more ambivalent.

 

So perhaps on some level, I felt that instinctive need to honor then hide away my dead. To scatter their ashes to wind and water, only I know exactly where. To safely entomb them behind walls of light so we all might finally get some rest in peace.

 

 

© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III