![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
muckefuckSaturday's memorial went off without a hitch. Dad was there, broken ankle and all, and the rest of us made it through our eulogies without losing it (thought it was a close thing). The outreach director for the local chapter of the Ethical Society conducted the service and, though he did a good job, he did get a couple things dead wrong about my brother.
He tried to be a little clever and work in M.'s love of gaming by means of a little discussion of D&D alignments. After explaining the two axes, he said, "M. was Chaotic Good." It got a good response, but it's not accurate. M.'s presentation was often chaotic because of the symptoms of his disease, but his orientation was solidly Lawful.
He cared about rules and he cared about "doing things right". Dad used to rely on him for proofreading because he'd internalised so well the rules of standard English punctuation and grammar we'd been taught. Among his most personal effects[*], I found a consent form for sex and a letter of apology to an escort offering her 10% of her fee for "wasting her time" (presumably, negotiating without coming to an arrangement).
But this was most starkly shown in how he kept house. In his remarks, the Director called it a "treasure trove" and hinted that it was untidy. Let me tell y'all: even at the height of my anxious repressed-homo perfect-boy childhood, I never kept my room as neat and organised as M.'s apartment. His system was evident everywhere, from the precise labeling and sorting of his RPG materials to the disposition of his kitchen to the many post-its and handwritten notes[**] surrounding his personal computer.
In a neat pile at the foot of the recliner, I found a device for converting cassettes to MP3s sitting atop the instructions and packaging it came in and next to a cassette tape of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. It was such a perfect snapshot of a project in process that I took a photo. We could tell from the neat arrangement of quarters and detergent pods on his coffee table that he was just about to do laundry.
My sister speculated that he needed everything carefully ordered to stay atop of the unpredictable effects of his disease. But he was always like this, from childhood on. Maybe because he was already fighting the disease or maybe it was his response to our chaotic earlier home life. (My sister only remembers moving once before high school; as Mom pointed out in her eulogy, we moved four times before M. was 7 years old.) Or maybe that was just how he was wired.
Regardless, it was how he lived. Going through his papers to find the few we wanted to keep for sentimental reasons before evaluating the rest for potential donation felt like a form of defilement, like pulling apart one of the Lego structures he'd so carefully assembled over the years or wrecking one of his carefully-considered plans with a few inconvenient facts.
[*] Can't tell you how glad I am to have stumbled upon these before my sister or my mother. They're buried at the bottom of a tall kitchen garbage bag now.
[**] The most poignant of these to me was one that said:
He tried to be a little clever and work in M.'s love of gaming by means of a little discussion of D&D alignments. After explaining the two axes, he said, "M. was Chaotic Good." It got a good response, but it's not accurate. M.'s presentation was often chaotic because of the symptoms of his disease, but his orientation was solidly Lawful.
He cared about rules and he cared about "doing things right". Dad used to rely on him for proofreading because he'd internalised so well the rules of standard English punctuation and grammar we'd been taught. Among his most personal effects[*], I found a consent form for sex and a letter of apology to an escort offering her 10% of her fee for "wasting her time" (presumably, negotiating without coming to an arrangement).
But this was most starkly shown in how he kept house. In his remarks, the Director called it a "treasure trove" and hinted that it was untidy. Let me tell y'all: even at the height of my anxious repressed-homo perfect-boy childhood, I never kept my room as neat and organised as M.'s apartment. His system was evident everywhere, from the precise labeling and sorting of his RPG materials to the disposition of his kitchen to the many post-its and handwritten notes[**] surrounding his personal computer.
In a neat pile at the foot of the recliner, I found a device for converting cassettes to MP3s sitting atop the instructions and packaging it came in and next to a cassette tape of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. It was such a perfect snapshot of a project in process that I took a photo. We could tell from the neat arrangement of quarters and detergent pods on his coffee table that he was just about to do laundry.
My sister speculated that he needed everything carefully ordered to stay atop of the unpredictable effects of his disease. But he was always like this, from childhood on. Maybe because he was already fighting the disease or maybe it was his response to our chaotic earlier home life. (My sister only remembers moving once before high school; as Mom pointed out in her eulogy, we moved four times before M. was 7 years old.) Or maybe that was just how he was wired.
Regardless, it was how he lived. Going through his papers to find the few we wanted to keep for sentimental reasons before evaluating the rest for potential donation felt like a form of defilement, like pulling apart one of the Lego structures he'd so carefully assembled over the years or wrecking one of his carefully-considered plans with a few inconvenient facts.
[*] Can't tell you how glad I am to have stumbled upon these before my sister or my mother. They're buried at the bottom of a tall kitchen garbage bag now.
[**] The most poignant of these to me was one that said:
SwedishClearly he was prepping to participate in discussions of current events.
Greta Thunberg
16 yrs old