Complicated Feelings: Eulogy and Euphoria

It has been a difficult week. It has been a difficult year.

I started this newsletter in a spur-of-the-moment decision, not really knowing what, if any, direction I wanted to take it in. I knew that I wanted to devote more time to the practice of writing, I knew that it might be helpful to build an online portfolio, and I hoped - in the back of my mind - that maybe this would help me on the job hunt which I have been on for over a year now. I’m writing this shortly after receiving another kind rejection from a job I interviewed for last week. At some point I’d like to tackle the topic of hiring and the current, exceptionally bleak, state of the job market for young people.

I have landed on a name for the newsletter: Complicated Feelings. It is a phrase I have found myself using very frequently as of late. Truthfully, I am completely freezing up, which is a frustrating feeling for someone who has never been shy to say exactly what he feels. I’ve been experiencing this paralysis more and more frequently lately, and writing my way out of it seems a lofty challenge. Thus, Complicated Feelings becomes the mantra: a title that demands no solution nor destination, but gives me someplace to start. As such, I am going to do my best to avoid generalizations and write specifically about my feelings on a number of topics.

We are collectively experiencing a lot of death and grief, in a period that some are calling the seventh mass extinction event. This extinction event is being accelerated by climate change, which further fuels disasters like the Los Angeles fires and puts us at greater risk of future pandemics. Additionally, and in the presence of the most well-documented genocide in history, we are still reeling from the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic which, I feel, we have still not taken the proper time to grieve. I am not psychologically equipped to be this exposed this frequently and this forcefully to death, and it seems to be affecting my relationship with life.

So I became fascinated with the history of eulogies, because in order to investigate my relationship with life and death, I wanted to first understand our societal rituals surrounding them. Eulogies date back to Ancient Greece, where they were typically focused on the deceased’s contributions to society, especially for warriors who died in battle. The word roughly translates to “speaking well [of]”, with “eu” meaning good/well, and “logia” meaning “speaking”. This practice was later adopted by the Romans for their funeral rites, but the modern understanding of a eulogy - a deeply personal celebration of a life at its end, interwoven with the grief of its deliverer - evolved during the Renaissance. This newsletter is not going to be focused on history; at least, not for now.

The root of all of my curiosity surrounding eulogies is a deep disquiet; a humming at the base of my skull where I once hit the concrete: Who will eulogize the lives lost quietly? As climate shocks become more frequent and intense, as water and resources become scarce and expensive, how will we make room for grief in a society that punishes vulnerability? How much higher is the death toll in Gaza than officially reported, how much death can we as a people take in stride and continue functioning? I, and I’m sure many others, have been asking similar questions for my entire adult life about rampant gun violence in the United States, especially after the events at Sandy Hook. It turns out we are perfectly capable of continuing to live in the face of massive amounts of death.

But these questions persist, amplified by the certainty that things can, and will, get more complicated. As I continue to grapple with my complicated feelings (see?) surrounding life, death, work, humanity, and writing, I want to try to end this newsletter that has five (5) subscribers at the time of writing on a somewhat positive anecdote:

After receiving the rejection email today I decided to take a walk to my local coffee shop to clear my head in the hopes that I might be able to focus on the job I currently have after returning home. The man behind the counter, Malcolm, greeted me by name and asked me how I was doing, to which I candidly replied that I’m trying my best, but am feeling a bit down having just had an opportunity fall through. “Let’s make something good then”, he replied with a smile having already entered my regular order into the point of sale. We chatted and laughed, and I made an off-color joke about how it would be slightly easier to watch the rise of fascism in the United States if I wasn’t living paycheck to paycheck.

As I think about that tiny moment in my local coffee shop I remember what truly makes eulogies important: humanness. All I ever want is to see and be seen by the people in my world, and the little moments I spend laughing through my pain do more to cement my legacy than any job ever could because those little moments are life. The collective euphoria of existing alongside everyone else and doing what we can to ease the weight of everything… that, to me, is where to look for meaning.

Things will get worse. My feelings will get even more complicated. But I will take a walk to my local coffee shop all the same and cling to every silver lining I can find until my own eulogy is read.

J.K.