High On Grief

I have a huge backlog of IFComp 2025 reviews to post from the author's forum. This was the one of two I had extra notes on, and it took up a lot more space. I think that will tell you about the impact this work had on me. I was ready to look at things in the past, and coming back to it six-plus months later, I realize I've had more ideas. Most of them are for me, and the big task here was making sure I was talking more about HoG than, well, myself. I repurposed a lot to my general writing-for-myself, and it still spilled over.

Bez's works always present me with a problem when reviewing in that, yes, they're about Bez's experiences or fears, refracted, but I sure do wind up talking about myself a lot. I actually intended to look at Yancy earlier during IFComp 2025, but then Charlie Kirk got assassinated, and, well, I had thoughts about that. Charlie Kirk's murder forced me to look a similar question to "how much respect do we give the dead we were in conflict with," namely, "how much respect do we give the dead who probably looked down on us?" (TLDR: not much. Hey, it's been six months. I don't feel bad saying this about Charlie Kirk.)

High on Grief (HG) is a relatively short work, given it takes place at the funeral of Yancy's mother and in the immediate aftermath. They did not see eye to eye, but everyone says "Oh, what your mother did for you" or also takes some angle on "but you don't really know her." (Neglecting, of course, that Yancy probably spent more time with the mother than the outsiders, and knowing someone is a two-way street. Among other issues.) I'd imagine the people around Yancy's mother, while kind on the surface, have self-selected, as Yancy's mother seems the type to ghost those who say "Hey, you're kind of out of bounds here."

Whether or not this sort of thing happens a lot in real life (Yancy asked to talk neutrally-at-worst about a hostile mother,) people certainly think about it and fear it in other context. I've had several adult authority figured who have either been useless or worse than useless, but they sure seemed to know a lot, or "you couldn't hate them." Some were more tangential, like the teacher who hard-sold me on how I really should be more interested in their subject, and if not, I was wasting my life.

In other words, they could not accept me for what I was. I had one teacher die during the COVID year of Parkinson's and my immediate thought was "why couldn't he have died of COVID?" And there was the teacher above, who was worse, whom I really WANTED to die of COVID, but who didn't. Which is ... not charitable. Let's just say the department head would've been much more receptive to my complaints than I thought he would be. There was intimidation going on. And these were flare-ups. Many years on I was able to write down my thoughts and why they didn't treat me like an actual person and why I deserved more. I wish I'd gotten there quicker. Maybe lashing out would've helped me do so.

So I definitely see where Yancy was coming from, and I remembered this, and I also realized I hadn't thought about these teachers much, which is relatively healthy. I wrote a lot about this sort of thing in the authors-only subforum for 2025. I needed to write it but it doesn't seem to be what I want in the final review. After all, on the forums there are those (details) collapsibles so people don't have read things. Here, there aren't.

The one thread running through is that Yancy's judgement and experiences seem to be repeatedly invalidated. The Pastor Dalton character in particular fits here, as someone who close to gets it, or who (as opposed to the mother's enablers) is willing to show basic respect without expecting fawning in return, who even avoids the "I let you heathens in here and you act all nasty" emotional blackmail, and it's extra frustrating to have them give a boilerplate text which ends with well, you'll feel less upset once you've cooled down, or now's not the right place. And yet whether or not Dalton means to be condescending, it feels that way. "See her as she truly is." (I thought only God could claim to do that!) Remember the good times. This reminded me of a sort-of friend I had who showed me stuff and that seemed like good times until I realized they'd balance it with some nasty backhanded jabs. Dalton will say God is a Mystery, etc., God works in mysterious ways, but he can't quite say Yancy has friends who can help more than he ever could, and those mysterious ways can occur even if you don't believe in God!

With regard to lashing out I'm reminded of Winston Churchill's quote on Democracy: "now's not the right time to say such things, even if every other time is worse." It's always too soon or too late. This is discussed in the story. But it's something I've had to deal with, even though the stakes may be lower.

So I had similar thoughts even though I'm a very different person from Yancy. I often wonder if I'm as far off in the weeds as some chemtrails conspiracy theorist when I think "Seemingly good person X wasn't so good." But there's a flip side to this. Some people I assumed everyone liked actually weren't well liked at all, and the smiles around them WERE forced, and I grieve the loss of peace for not realizing that. I haven't been called the wrong pronoun but I remember being sweet-talked I was too old for certain toys and later called "that kid." Or I've had people let me know I'm less of a person for liking boring things (e.g. not needing constant excitement,) or less of a man for not liking certain things. By family or otherwise. I'm still shocked to see people in this community have their family as testers. And each time I do I realize my family wasn't hostile but there sure was a lack of support or willingness to share happiness.

HoG offers only a few choices, and I think the one that matters least is one that would seem like the most dramatic. Do you give a standard funeral speech or do you just say screw it? The second leads to the pastor comforting you above, and either way, you need to call one of three friends. Or, well, this is where the "high" part of the title comes in.

Because the big dramatic moment is when Yancy makes pot brownies out of their mother's ashes. It was a vow to themselves, sort of as revenge. It has echoes of The Dude and Walter smoking Donnie's ashes in The Big Lebowski, only it's intentional, and it's funny to think of what Yancy's mother would think of drug use. I suspect Yancy had some guilt feelings about hearing their mother say "I deserved better than to raise a drug addict. I did everything right. Right?" (Note: "addict" is Yancy's mother talking, not me. And it certainly seems Yancy's mother has, obliviously, turned certain risk factors way up on the dial. But my immediate reaction was to think, Yancy's mother would frame a personal choice of Yancy's as a referendum on the mother, as if Yancy were trying to prove the mother's Great Mother Credentials wrong, but you just can't prevent someone going bad.)

I had a mini-revelation/recall with all this. I remember reacting to certain bad news by playing too much FreeCell, which is not drugs, but it can be seen as its own sort of spiraling, though a more legitimate and respectable type. I often came away with one or two ideas at the end, but (I later learned) not as many as if I'd just kept my computer off. So potentially addictive behaviors are a thing. And I realized that I certainly had the same dilemmas Yancy had -- even in college, I remember wanting to write a story about the horrible teacher, but it felt disloyal. What I wrote featured a classmate named Krusty LeGrand telling the main character (roughly) "anyone'd be grateful to be in teacher X's class! I'm like one of the biggest nonconformists out there but I wouldn't mess around if given that big chance." I only regret not following up and writing something better, sooner.

That's my revelation, but Yancy has a revelation that fulfilling this long-term fantasy (one that probably helped stave off worse depression & is relatively harmless as fantasies go) could mean three different things: is it revenge, is it something silly, or is it making things worse?

You have a chance to replay after this, choosing how to look at things, and you call a different friend and can revise what you think based on this. So I think this is saying you don't have to focus on what you should have said at the funeral, and that is worth spinning in your mind instead of the funeral. It's what we hope is the case, and we have no proof it is. But we have friends to stabilize us, or we deserve to, whether or not we are good people. Calling back to the Charlie Kirk example above, I watched a lot of YouTube videos focusing on why we shouldn't lionize him as a martyr, and we can say this without being horrible people. It provided a logical path through, just as HoG provided emotional justification for not being perfectly understanding of people I disliked in person.

Balancing respect for humanity with not respecting certain people's actions is the sort of tricky balancing act that weighs you down even if you don't have the environment Yancy has. We've all had someone like this, because these people actively make themselves present in other people's lives, and they of course aren't going to hand you a permission slip to block them out of your life, and they'll never admit to being awful. It's a universal problem, even if they "only" partially invalidated us for who we are.

I could picture someone watching my 17-year-old self reading through HoG, even though Twine didn't exist back then, and making a snide comment about "Hahaha that's weird, you're not going to snap too are you?" But my 17-year-old self could've used that. Or the company of people who would "get" or need something like HoG. I'd be less defensive now, and I'd feel less need to justify myself. Yay progress. Boo progress happening too slowly.

After all this woolgathering, though, I took a step back. I thought a bit. And suddenly I asked the question: sure, Yancy may've made a scene at the funeral, but ... what if the roles were reversed, say, if Yancy were driven to suicide? I could picture Yancy's mother taking shots both passive and overt at "well I tried to understand them" and perhaps eliciting comfort and "you did the best you could." And while Yancy's behavior is easier to call out, it's also more likely to help Yancy become a better person. I couldn't see the mother being reflective after the funeral.