A Year of Saying Goodbye
Once a Week, Every Week, in VR
It was pretty obvious that we’d all be losing so much so fast we wouldn’t be able to keep up. Wouldn’t even be able to Say Goodbye the way we’d want to and need to.
Someone would just get irritated and tell you to stop being Debbie Downer.
A lot of people just need permission; that’s the part I figured out in late March, 2020 when I started organizing and hosting events in the only place we could be close— a virtual reality place, with its superpower of shared presence.
Just to make sure it was completely clear, I named the event Saying Goodbye.
People got it right away. I introduced the thing every week just like I introduced this article: We’ve all lost so much, what would you like to Say Goodbye to?
I’d be explicit about how hard it is to say what we’re feeling about what we’ve lost. I’d bring up the Debbie Downer response. I don’t tend to say words like bereavement or grieving that sound like mental health. I just say, ‘here it’s ok to say stuff.’
Sometimes someone will raise their avatar hand after that kind of invitation. But not usually.
The next step is to call on people, which is just the next level of giving permission. Raising a hand is a self-initiated action, no matter how much it is invited. Raising a hand singles a person out in the group as someone who claims to have something to say that is relevant and matters. That’s a significant statement and a big obstacle.
Forty to fifty people join our event for some part of an hour-plus and our average peak attendance is around 25. My guess is that most people just come to see what’s up and had no prior intention of sharing any intimate and difficult part of their life.
Saying Goodbye takes place in an evening-themed Zen Garden World, created by master World Builder, Alan Chao. There’s no marked seating but it’s easy to find your place. It holds our normal 25 or so just right; and if there’s as few as 10 people at some moment that feels ok too.
It’s calm, natural, a little different. Crickets lightly chirping in the background.
I’ll call someone’s avatar name, ask them if they’d like to say anything if I give them the megaphone, as I’m getting them the megaphone. That gives them about 2–3 seconds to get over the shock of hearing their name in a public place.
Then there’s that exquisite beginning. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Yes, we hear you great!’
‘Oh, ok, well I didn’t really have anything to say …
This is almost mandatory.
Sometimes I need to wait a beat, or two, right there, let it come. Sometimes, maybe a little nudge, like, ‘well we’re glad to have you here, CoolAvatarName, any thoughts come up as you’ve been listening?’
My guess is that singling individuals out in a group using what is usually a funny or unusual avatar name instead of their Real Life identity is part of the VR magic.
But it also has to be OK not to say anything.
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I’ll thank someone who doesn’t feel like speaking and say, ‘just being here is an active thing you’re doing, coming to some crazy event in VR called Saying Goodbye — just doing that is a stretch, and we need you here to listen and just be a human, so thanks and keep up the good work.’ And I mean that. It’s not a disappointment to me.
But a lot of the time, people do just start talking out loud without any apparent self-censorship about what they’ve lost. You can tell they’re surprised at themselves as they bring out anything from their cousin dying last month to their father dying twelve years ago.
Or losing their job. Or having their high school graduation taken away.
That’s where we started one year ago. The NBA cancelling. The NCAA cancelling. Older teenagers all over the world realizing there wasn’t going to be a graduation. They had planned these events for years, dreamed about them even longer. Young people came to Saying Goodbye and talked about the competition for prominent roles. How hard they’d worked.
They let out some of their sadness and we felt it. It doesn’t make the awful feelings go away. Nothing was fixed. No one was redeemed. Just a step in a process.
Part of the spirit of the event from the beginning is We-Don’t-Compare-Loss. We need to Say Goodbye to grandparents AND graduations, loved ones AND lost jobs, Pets AND People. And that’s what’s happened. What’s still happening.
The very first time, I didn’t know if anyone would come. I didn’t need them to come. I’m not building a brand or a Saying Goodbye business. I just thought some people might need it. Turns out they did.
Last night a young woman told us about six deaths in her life in just a few months. Family members, pets. Now her husband is at the end stage of a chronic disease. Things aren’t easy with the rest of her family. It all came out in the Zen Garden.
I had no advice. I never do. The event isn’t, How to Say Goodbye, according to Tom.
The VR environment matters and there are micro ingredients that matter too. There is also a style and a tone I bring to the Host role that’s probably part of it. I’m able to help people know for sure that they were heard, that I really got what they wanted to tell us and everyone else did too. Sometimes I draw briefly from my own experience. Sometimes I connect to a bigger concept, or sometimes I go back to what someone else said earlier.
Last night, I just told the young woman with all the loss happening at once how moved we all were and how brave she was. I told her she inspired us by being able to come here and reach out to other people and tell her story right from the heart that way.
We breathed.
I said something else. Then I called on someone else.
It was someone I couldn’t quite place until he mentioned driving by the grave of his friend every day on the way to work and I remembered everything.
I also remembered the woman from Manhattan who was there one night last May, telling us about her father dying somewhere else in the city, alone. Then she introduced the avatar next to her, her sister, who lived in Queens. Might as well have been Mars at that point.
VR was where they could meet. Saying Goodbye was where they chose to be together.
They kept coming for weeks. We learned a lot about their family. Then their father died. We saw them once more and then again a few months later. They were having a hard time saying goodbye.
As the months went by, some people would drop in over and over to be part of the event, maybe to say more. Most people who come are new, though, every time — often brand-new to VR. People getting their first headset that day and finding themselves in AltspaceVR at an event called Saying Goodbye and not quite knowing what’s going on.
I have heard stories that have opened me up to a range of human experience I knew existed, but was pretty abstract. Now I have a better idea of what some people are carrying around, all the time. Now that I know what to count on, I can be a better host.
Like the time a young male avatar named L., early twenties I’d guess, told us about his best friend, who told him he needed to have a talk, but instead of dropping everything L. told his friend he had to finish what he was doing and he’d get back to him. Well, it was then or not at all.
How could he have known? How couldn’t he have known his friend was ready to end everything? How can he ‘move on’ now? I have no idea. But I was pretty sure there were people in our little VR group right in that moment who had been in that exact same position as L. and now time had passed for them. So I asked.
Three people immediately put up their avatar hands. Each one spoke. Each one was emotional. Each one seemed like they had more reason to believe they could have made a difference than the one before. Two of the three were in tears themselves. One had never told the story before.
They each spoke to L. and told him what happens in time is you see how complicated everything is and it can’t be your fault, but it’s hard to see that now. L. didn’t say anything, just took it in.
We were maybe fifteen minutes into the week’s event. It was just getting warmed up.
The guy who was in a polyamory community had our attention quickly in a mildly titillating way, describing how things are for their group in Zoom-only times. Then he told us about a live group Zoom session when someone did coke in the bathtub home alone that wasn’t coke. It was almost uncut fentanyl and she was dizzy almost immediately, and unable to climb out of the tub as her horrified friends screamed to do while they saw her slip, hit her head and go under.
They were still watching on Zoom when the EMTs arrived and took her body out of the tub.
The next person who spoke was depressed and not functioning well since the death of her chihuahua a few weeks ago.
A 15 year old boy from northern Alabama spoke with poise about his great-grandfather dying. They couldn’t have a funeral. I asked him to tell us about his great-grandfather and he remembered sitting in his lap on the riding lawn mower smelling the grass and almost falling asleep.
I had seen J. a few times before but he had never spoken. Now that he was ready he told us in a very level tone about not getting along with his Dad at all when he was a kid and then at around 13 he decided to try. He reached out. His Dad reached back. They talked once and J. accepted him as a Friend on Facebook not knowing his Dad had died suddenly and unexpectedly that morning.
He told us he couldn’t handle it then, couldn’t even go to the funeral, so he just closed it off, except he couldn’t.
It’s been over ten years and what he wanted to tell us is that he’s been opening himself up to his Dad dying. Going to his grave has helped a lot. Talking to people too. But he made a ritual out of going to the grave and it surprised him how strong it felt.
As the pandemic has disrupted even the most basic human practices of remembering and saying goodbye to the dead, J.’s story shows it’s what we bring to it that makes a ritual meaningful.
Saying Goodbye is hard for more than one reason, but one of them is simply that when we miss the expected or culturally stipulated moment, we can feel like we’ve missed our chance altogether. There’s a way we are supposed to say goodbye and if we don’t do that, there can be an incomplete feeling.
J.’s story can help free people from that idea.
We are making up new rituals in new Virtual Worlds and Saying Goodbye is one of them. Toward the end of that week’s event, the man from the polyamory community raised his hand again.
He carried his story further and told us he is no longer in that community, that he felt he had to leave it, which meant leaving all his friends and everyone that mattered to him. We could feel his emotions all mixed up still. He said goodbye.
No one said anything. Usually I think it’s best to stay in the sadness but I felt something else there. I asked, ‘have you made new friends?’
His tone changed again as he said, ‘I think maybe.’
Another piece of the VR magic is precisely what people who haven’t experienced VR as it currently exists think is wrong — cartoony avatars.
I have news for everyone. We are already cartoony avatars. These physical bodies represent us in the consensus reality we share, but I don’t think anyone believes their gross container is them, 100% and completely. Plus, we go to extreme lengths to manage other people’s impression of our container by altering it in ways that demonstrate how much our bodies are just another avatar. Elective surgery is just another name for editing your avatar.
One very important effect of the technical basis for VR avatars at this moment is the way it disables our snap judgment system. Avatars are not what we would call photorealistic at this time, so some of the assumptions we unconsciously make about people before they even open their mouth Don’t Get Made.
Makes it easier as a Host to just meet people wherever they are.
When I called on someone once and he said he wanted to Say Goodbye to someone he never knew, someone who never was, I didn’t know where the guy was leading us. He could have been trolling. I asked him if he wanted to say more.
We all heard his voice change when he said, ‘yeah, I was ready to man up and I told her that, I was going to do the right thing. She said she wasn’t ready, she couldn’t do it. I was. Someone was already alive for me. Not any more.’
Later that night, two avatars standing next to each other told us how they each lost a spouse and then met each other.
H. from Edinburgh told them how happy their story made him feel, best he’d felt in months. He didn’t want to say goodbye to his old self, who used to be upbeat and sociable, he said. But he’d lost touch with him. Now he just felt nervous all the time.
I asked him how long he’d been coming to events with other people like this in VR and he said this was his first time.
I told him I’m pretty sure he is already in a new chapter and I sent him a Friend request. I love Edinburgh. I can’t wait to talk with him.
Then I ended that event the way I’ve ended every event once I realized we were all together in a ritual VR space. I created a small fireball in midair and said that was a punctuation mark, but it will keep burning and we will be back again.
I publish an occasional substack piece on topics other than VR at https://tnickel32.substack.com/ and have written previous articles about Saying Goodbye here on Medium:
Death Q&A, Saying Goodbye in VR, June 6, 2020
This Week in Bereavement, July, 2020
Remembering RBG in VR, September 23, 2020
Skye’s Beautiful VR Funeral, October, 24, 2020
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