Egoist Mourning: The Emotional Ownership of One’s Memory

Initially, I smiled. I always have the normatively incorrect reactions to difficult topics such as death, especially when the deceased passes in a way deemed as unduly tragic by society, such as a fentanyl overdose. It was after I saw her online obituary that I found myself, a few hours later, bawling in my bathtub. A few weeks would pass, and I would call the national suicide hotline, explaining through stutters and tears how, if she had but minded what I told her about her personal safety, she might be alive today. They told me I was perceptive before I hung up.

We met in jail. Alexis (her name has been changed to protect her privacy) and I became fast friends after I showed her my arrest warrant. We got a kick out of pointing out how elementary school students have better grammar than the cop that typed up his rendition of the night I caught my felony charge. Alexis was incarcerated for simple possession-based probationary violations, for which no rehabilitation alternatives were offered. Or so she told us. It is well-known among those that have been in the penal system that snitches are treated very well by the court, with a word that holds veracity turning prison time into house arrest or a year-long rehab program. The fact that Alexis was made to flatten her time on a second–not a third–violation is telling about how she was viewed by the prosecutor’s office. She left a week before I was pulled into a windowless room bearing only a table and chairs. An investigator told me I was expected to sign my plea deal that day, implying the state, after seventeen months, was more preoccupied with other things than minding my due process rights. I picked up the ballpoint pen. I figured my life would be better on state probation as opposed to county.

My last day in jail, a mutual acquaintance and cellmate gave me Alexis’s new phone number. I opted to use my own PIN debit. I encountered Alexis drinking with a woman she had also met at the complex. I wished both of them well, informed them of how I was getting released at any moment, and said, “You two be careful, now. The streets are not the same as they used to be. Have fun, but please be safe.” I recall her saying, “Thank you!” before my name. I said goodbye, hung up, and waited to be escorted through the metal gate by a corrections officer. It would be someone still at the complex that told me about her death, messaging me over the Smart Communications tablet system. That message came a little over a week after I properly enjoyed the sun for the first time in seventeen months. As in, standing outside unencumbered by barbed wire fences and five-minute rules. I was only taken outside three times during my stay at the correctional complex.

Nowadays, her photo sits in a ceramic frame on my dresser. I catch the self-conscious, mildly meditative, yet ultimately challenging glimmer in her green eyes each time I sort my laundry. It is edifying to contemplate, despite how many have told me I care too much, in addition to those that have claimed she never cared for me in the first place, how those very eyes could be watching over me. This is not a saccharine claim that those in the afterlife have a vested interest in our affairs, and the question of the afterlife’s existence is not a deterrent to me fulfilling my interests in this world. It is enough for me to remember her in my mind’s eye. It is my personal point-of-view holding what is left of her in my focus. Here, she exists yet again, having been revitalized like Lazarus emerging from the tomb, as the property of my consciousness, embellished with the memories I have of her teaching me Phase 10. Enduring COVID alongside me in a cinder block hole. Picking lice nits out of each other’s hair. Of her climbing the grate on the balcony, which prevented those in cells on the second floor of the pod from pushing people over it, just to flip off the two-way mirrors on the control tower. Seeing her smile again is a gift I give myself whenever my own probation officer says or does something callous. When the overpriced utilities bills come in the mail. When a police officer stops me on my walk to the bus stop, having seen me glare at him checking for speeders on the side of the nearby highway. When a warden at the state prisons housing our friends decides to turn off messaging options for the inmates, rendering it almost impossible to contact someone digitally with prepaid stamps, for which there are no refunds. Fucking dicks.

According to the five stages model of grief, I oscillate between them on a weekly basis. Sometimes, I'm furious at how the system overlooked her very existence for so long, before I remember the world I inhabit. I’ll see her name printed on a flyer for a play on a bodega window, and it will be difficult for me to hold back tears. Other times, I’ll run the details of her funeral arrangements over in my head, wondering if it was all fake, and she's alive somewhere, but she has to stay on the down-low because of the connections she had in her city. I know she's boron-colored ash in an urn on her mother’s mantle. And when I return to viewing her memory again as my property, I somehow move beyond acceptance of her death to a nirvana-like gratitude for ever having met her. Death becomes not just a part of life, but a reason to cherish her even more, for now I have the opportunity to live in the wake of her legacy, which has invigorated me into remembering how short my life actually is. How fragile. And yet, how full of my capacity to pursue that which makes me whole.

Those familiar with the biography of Max Stirner are aware of how he lost his first wife and child in childbirth, to say nothing about the deaths of his father in his early years and his mother later in life. Max Stirner emerges as a journalist at Hippel’s, converging with the Young Hegelians and the likes of Marx and Engels, as a widower. An orphan. A man who tried to catch his stride in academia, but whose contributions to the world of anarchist thought exist among radicals, proudly vagabondish freethinkers, and those trying to get uncaught from the machine of AI-besotted capitalism, ready for the day the cogs are manually ripped from the inner workings. I catch myself wondering how, upon the realization of what would become egoist philosophy, Stirner turned his rubicon upon himself and his internal world. And then I cease asking, as I already know my answer. His memory is his property. It is his to do with as he pleases. Should it have impacted how he crafted ‘The Ego and Its Own,’ it would only have been to my benefit and my challenge, as it was his philosophy that reminded me that I could own my memory of Alexis, assimilating the lessons learned observing her life into my person to further become myself. It led me to call that hotline. To turn myself into the psych ward. To eventually “pull myself together” into getting my first apartment.

I am often told by people who have their own ways of grieving that I need to “move on.” I find this phrasing to be misleading, as people usually say this to be helpful. In reality, this type of remark is deployed to bring the grieving person under the control of the one observing the said individual’s mourning process.

The process of grieving, as I understand it, involves coming to terms with both the foundation and the ramifications of another’s allowed presence in your life. It involves assimilating the memories of the person with the reality that an inevitable force has stopped you from forming more, as the memories are now all you have, as the deceased is no longer around to also act according to their self-interest by potentially being in your life. When someone refers to another as “my friend,” for example, the pronoun ‘my’ implies the ownership of the relationship to the speaker, combined with the speaker’s personal connotations about what it means to be labeled as ‘friend.’ By referring to the deceased as property, in a Stirnerian sense, we do not disavow the idea that said person did not once have their own self-interest. We often speak in regards to the memory of the deceased as belonging to them. Her memory. His legacy. Their life, in retrospective. And so on. We understand that their lives belonged to them, ironically only now that said life ceases to be in anything other than the mental wanderings of those still alive. I posit we do this to avoid the psychological discomfort of ‘our’ memories being the last place the deceased can exist, combined with our opinions of who they were. When we put tombstones over a grave, or dedicate an urn, or even buy a T-shirt with their face and death date, the deceased does not care. They are not here. But what is present are the resonances you have in your mind associated with the person. It is because of the voluntary application of a personal definition of sacredness–how pleasing and beneficial, despite external obstacles–that we make the decision to honor the deceased. We imply as much in our collective consciousness: “Funerals are for the living.” Even a relationship formed on not-so-great memories, such as that of Alexis and myself, can be held as beloved, so long as the egoist deems it so for their purposes.

So how can someone be told to abandon the memories that are their property to do with as they wish? Moving on when you give such a request implies a mourner should rectify all changes the deceased brought about within that person. Should they not reject your assertion over their property? Do our memories not belong to us? To embolden us for better living, as much as to bring us into the darker portions of ourselves? When you request someone to expedite their grieving process, you claim the property of another person. You view them through the lens of the spook of a standardized grieving process, abolishing the nature of the property in the process, as it is not really that memory you care for, nor is it really the person a mourner has become as a result of grief, either. You are attempting to control the inconvenience the grieving person gives you by asserting yourself over that which you have no self-interest in, apart from it being an obstacle to you obtaining a version of the now-grieving person you deem useful to your purposes. It has no bearing on the person who has died. It has everything to do with making someone perform an emotional action (abandoning their current mourning for one that serves, among other things, the hellscape of “the way things should be”). It is in someone’s self-interest to process their grief as they know they need to. There is no set timeline for coming to terms with death, and those terms are yours to decide and edit. I wonder often if I will ever finish, and I am okay with it taking my entire life to do so. Frankly, I think mourning does take out entire lives, and no one wants to admit how loss permeates their everyday lives. I value what I had, as well as what I have now. I am perfectly alright with invoking Alexis during conversations that may make other people uncomfortable. That may annoy them. That may cause them to rethink their assessments of me and what knowing me does for them. It is remembering this loss that has spurned me towards the self I enjoy being.

It is not easy to be one’s own person, which goes without saying, and yet, it is a constant source of contention, especially on the subject of people no longer here. My defensiveness, to me, is not something to be dissected in a therapist’s office, should that not be what I wish to do. But if it is more transformative for me to transmute the memory into a reminder for myself, then what is it to anyone else? If my feelings on the matter interfere with how they process their own losses, I have made no claim to that emotive property. Facing our emptiness, along with everything that feeds said hole, is our individual cause, alone. I wish everyone the best with that which they never tell another. I wish it on myself, after all.

The obituary had to be closed for comments. Someone that openly stated a lack of a connection to Alexis made a claim under her listed birthday that he hoped drug pushers were taken off the streets. The funeral home, I take it, deemed it necessary to render unavailable new additions to the ‘wishes’ function. Some people got to plant trees, though. Regardless, such commentary makes no difference to me. I cannot be offended when I see her in the butterflies that pass me mowing my yard. When a song we both enjoyed plays on the radio, just as I'm worried about how a situation replete with unknowns will end. When someone mentions that they too have lost a loved one to an overdose, and I get to share with them the property of my grief in response to theirs. It is yet another way I can bring myself to experience the NOW as I wish. In all its colorful glory, which happens to include the black hole into which we all disappear.

And I think that's about as spooky as I'd like to get.