I still don’t know what to say about Aaron’s suicide. But again, this is what I did say, this time at the memorial service this week at the MIT Media Lab.
When we say we “know” a fact like our phone number, we mean something different than we we say we “know” how to ride a bicycle. And we mean something still different when we say we “know someone.” The first and last time I spoke publicly about Aaron was at his funeral. At the time, I said that it has been the first time I’ve to figure out how to remember someone—much less someone I loved. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t. Because, like “knowing someone,” “remembering someone” can mean too many things.
Nonetheless, I’d like to share the anecdote that’s come closest to capturing what I mean when I say that I want to remember Aaron. I’ve lifted it from Peter Drucker:
A new hospital administrator, holding his first staff meeting, thought that a rather difficult matter had been settled to everyone’s satisfaction when one of the participants suddenly asked, “Would this have satisfied Nurse Bryan?” At once the argument started all over and did not subside until a new and much more ambitious solution to the problem had been hammered out.
Nurse Bryan, the administrator learned, had been a long-serving nurse at the hospital. She was not particularly distinguished, had not in fact ever been a supervisor. But whenever a decision on a patient’s care came up on her floor, Nurse Bryan would ask, “Are we doing the best we can do to help this patient?” Patients on Nurse Bryan’s floor did better and recovered faster. Gradually over the years, the whole hospital had learned to adopt what came to be known as Nurse Bryan’s Rule; had learned, in other words, to ask, “Are we really making the best contribution to the purpose of this hospital?” Though Nurse Bryan herself had retired almost ten years earlier, the standards she had set still made demands on people who in terms of training and position were her superiors.
In an effort to remember, I’ve biked around taking photos of our regular hangouts, I’ve written journal entries, I’ve reread old emails…But all of those—in one way or another—feel more like embalming Aaron than remembering him. They take him ‘as he was’ and they freeze-dry him. They let me rewind. And I can’t help but think—every time I break my fast and read the most recent blog post or article or profile—that maybe the best way to remember Aaron is to pretend that he’s not dead. I know that sounds totally pathological. And I’m sure there are versions of it which are. But in the past two months—jesus; I can’t believe that it’s only been sixty days—I’ve gotten a lot of use out of this. Because ultimately, what I miss most isn’t the stuff that happened, but the stuff that was going to happen.
Aaron was one of my only friends who really liked walking and talking as much as I do. And so I’ve taken walks, thinking through a conversation in my mind, pitching an idea or problem I’m working on to Aaron and hearing him—just a little nasal and exasperated—push back on it. And on one of these walks it struck me that this is what I mean when I say I know someone—that I can imagine what they’d say and do and how they’d feel. And that when I think about “remembering” Aaron I mean something much deeper than asking, “What would Aaron do?” I mean, “What would I have done were I the person I’d have become if Aaron were still alive?” That’s a much more complicated question.
Lots of times when I hear people “memorialize” Aaron, what drowns out everything else is a sense that people want to turn him into a symbol for openness or hacktivism or free culture or whatever—because after all, we all have our own stories to tell. And please don’t get me wrong, no one I know would be happier with a politicized and utility-maximizing death than Aaron. And as his executor, I’ve ended up getting all these queries which provide me bits and pieces of insight into all the different ways that Aaron’s getting unpacked and decompiled and stored in people’s lives and memories. And people let me in to talk about them or help them make sense of things. On good days I think it’s a beautiful process and on bad days I think it’s all a selfish way for each of us to use his memory to make us each feel better about ourselves. Obviously, both are true.
And that’s the really frustrating part, because the part of our relationship I valued most was how we both acknowledged our responsibility was basically to make the other person feel worse about themselves and the work they did. In some ways, what I miss most is how Aaron could be a pace car—even if we weren’t in the same race. And so really, the thing that’s helped the most in my effort to figure out what I mean when I say I want to “remember” has been simply sitting down each week to write up an imaginary conversation. And in that conversation, I always have to come up with some story connecting what I’m doing tomorrow with what I want to see happen in the world. And more than any one idea or value of Aaron’s, it’s when I see that self-reflection reified in the people he touched that I feel most at peace.
Aaron had this tremendously charming shorthand for talking about people in terms of what 'teams’ they were on. You could be on Team Fame or Team Money or Team Family, or whatever. And it’s a really interesting question, because of course we all have allegiances to multiple teams, but it can be surprisingly clarifying and obvious which team a given person is playing for. And for me at least, “remembering” Aaron has quickly reduced to regularly auditioning for a spot on the team Aaron aspired to: Team Impact.