Those Who Will Remain as Memory, and Those Who Will Live by It

When I was small, my grandmother told me the story of a relative who died meeting a bear in a winter forest. The story is rather grisly, so I will not set it out in detail — but I do not think my grandmother lied. He ended his life young; I know neither his face nor his name, and he could not have known of my existence either. Yet at the least, he is remembered by me, nearly a century on, as the man killed by a bear. And now, probably, he will be remembered in the heads of you who have read this. What he could never have imagined, though, is that he would be remembered not by his name, his character, his deeds, the things he loved — not, that is, by his life — but by his death.

Nothing lasts forever, they say — but a human life of less than a century is itself the appointed instant. Of the countless human beings who have passed across this earth, those who enjoy the privilege of remaining as their lives are a vanishing few. In many cases we do not even know who the artisans were who made the ancient artworks enshrined in our museums. Unlike the tiny minority who left their names in writing, in painting, in music, in mathematical formulae, even in law, most people — myself included — will remain only in the heads of the few who knew us, and when they too depart, even that trace will vanish.

Would you rather be remembered by your life, or by your death? Alas, this is not ours to choose. The initiative of this memory belongs, squarely, to others. They will remember us in the manner they wish. In What Remains of Edith Finch (2017), Edie testifies that her husband Sven died fighting a dragon. She remembers her many departed family members in her own manner. She remembers them by their deaths.

[Fig. 1] The Finch family tree is filled with memories of those who have gone.

A life that can be remembered only by its strange, singular death — does that not feel a little helpless? Looking into the memories of the Finch family’s members, the work chose to show not the good and happy episodes of their lives but their final deaths. What must be noted, though, is that these are not deaths as mere fact: they are deaths realized through the memories of other members of the family. Humans are among the few animals that assign meaning to the deaths of their own kind, and so the work’s process of weaving stories of death realized in this way can show far more than realizing death itself would. For instance…

“Of all the stories I’d heard about Barbara’s death, I was surprised this was the one Edie kept.”

What Barbara Finch left the world was a single severed ear. And all we can confirm of her death is the lurid, fantastical gossip of a tabloid. This is the memory of her death that Edie — Barbara’s mother — chose: a very deliberately selected version. That Edie, of the many versions of the tragic case of her daughter’s disappearance (and probable brutal murder), kept this magazine’s of all things and shows it to us must be because this version, so astonishingly insulting to Barbara’s death, paradoxically projects her life with astonishing fidelity.

A child actor who flared into stardom through a horror film. Her glory had faded, but she went on dreaming of new chances, her passion for film and for acting intact. In that light, an ending in which Barbara is devoured by the monsters and killers of the horror movies that remember and adore her prime holds true. It realizes the life of Barbara — who loved the movies and kept her identity as an actor — in the very depiction of her death. That is why her mother set this magazine before her memorial portrait. Against the realistic surmise that her being robbed of her dreams and her future was mere unlucky tragedy, the magazine may be a tribute to the things she loved — or to her, who lived a life of loving something ardently.

Not Barbara alone: the memories of most family members’ deaths project their lives. Molly dreamed of the sea creatures she loved; Gus despised his father’s remarriage. This shows through the various texts that remember their deaths. While memory gives its testimony now in one’s own diary, now in the letters of those nearby, now even in photographs, the player plays these deaths directly. But the player is no investigator, no detective. The portion entrusted to the player is never to uncover the truth of these deaths.

While Sam’s letter to his wife Kay is read aloud, the player plays Gregory’s death. Or rather — it is nothing but playtime in the bathtub, depicted as a joyful expedition, swimming with toy duck and frog and block-figure friends toward the tub’s deep floor. Because, as Sam writes in the letter, Gregory is an innocent baby delighting in the discovery of a world adults cannot see. The circumstances of Gregory’s death are described very briefly and obliquely; Sam wrote only to console a grieving, self-reproaching Kay. And the note that this letter was written on the last page of the couple’s divorce papers depicts even the reach of Gregory’s death into those left behind.

[Fig. 2] The stage treating each figure’s death is designed in a different composition, fitted to that figure’s life.

These memories are, in essence, for the living. The player experiences a death while listening to the story of someone left behind, and through that single scene experiences the departed person’s life as well. The many memories of death lodged through the house are realized as stages of varied genre and mood. What these deaths share is not so much how accidental and strange they were as the fact that they were bound intimately to the lives of those who died — all the more so when one considers that Dawn, who left this house, ended her life in no such manner.

“When I was young, I assumed every house had sealed-off rooms and peepholes.”

In the Finch house, space is set aside for everyone who ever passed through it. Even the traces of Sven, Kay, and Sanjay — the spouses who married in — hold their small places. The house is a space holding the memory of all who belonged to the family, expanding and building upward into ever stranger shapes with each generation, until the rooms of its last residents, Dawn and Edith, sat perched at a summit from which coming down to dinner would take a good five minutes. And here the house’s history ends: with Dawn and Edith leaving — and with Edie, who lived her whole life here, leaving the world.

[Fig. 3] The house has had as many spaces added on as there were family members who stayed here.

The premise that Odin, Edie’s father, brought the house from Norway to Orcas Island grants the storytelling both an advantage and a point of interest. Take the house as the story’s skeleton, and there is the expedient that one need spend no labor on the Finch family’s history in Norway, speaking only of the four generations or so who have lived on this island. That the house Odin brought sank with him in the waters off Orcas Island, and that a new generation — the couple Edie and Sven — took some of its bricks to settle a new place and raise a new Finch house, is an intuitive way of figuring the narrative of an immigrant family. It also lends a plausible tension for speaking of the “curse” said to follow the Finches.

But it is worth remembering, too, that this house begins with Edie and ends with Edie. Here she bore her children, raised her grandchildren, saw her great-grandchildren. Through all those long years she kept the house, recording the many family members (down to the pets) who came here and went. Every member has a room of their own. Each room holds each life. When they leave the world, the room is not emptied but preserved as it was in life. Edie made, in every room, a shrine honoring the member who had gone. For members newly arriving, not an emptied room but a newly built space is prepared.

This is why the house came to so strange a shape. The house is an intangible repository of Edie’s memory — the inside of her head, realized as physical space. The common rooms, too, are stiflingly full of photographs, books, newspapers, knickknacks. Every part, great and small, is a fragment of the memories, great and small, accumulated in Edie’s life. Through the windows of the house on its shore, the traces of the old house sunk beneath the sea can sometimes be seen. The house that held the childhood Edie must have lived in Norway now lies in the far water with her father — and she now bears the charge, as this house’s new mistress, of working out a new life, in a new place, with a new family.

So the family grew, the rooms grew, the house grew. Deaths piled up; graves multiplied. The memories she kept grew many. And when her granddaughter Dawn — who had left the house and returned with her children — lost a child in her turn, what she did was seal the rooms of the dead, so that these memories Edie kept would not seep out to her own children. She stopped Edie’s mouth, so to speak, from bringing the memories out to the remaining children. And Edie drilled peepholes in the sealed doors — so as to tell Dawn’s children her memories, a very little at a time.

“If there’s a pattern to these stories, it’s that none of us ever got very far.”

Odin’s migration to a new land was, it is said, to escape the family’s curse — yet here, too, the curse did not cease. The family kept meeting death. Of Edie’s five children, one alone survived into adulthood. Of three grandchildren, one alone survived into adulthood. Of three great-grandchildren, one alone survived into adulthood. All this “curse” has in common is the bare fact of death. Its substance — origin and end unknown — remains for players an element never made clear to the last. But it is clear, at the least, that the members of the Finch family believed in the curse’s existence, or were at minimum conscious of it.

Odin believed in the curse. He may well have tied the deaths of his wife Ingeborg and his son Johann to it. He left Norway, saying he would escape it. Sam, the only one of the five siblings to reach adulthood, became a soldier and a survivalist in order to survive death, and drilled his own children severely. The story of the curse governed their lives, weighing on a lifetime of conduct and choice. Some left the house; some faced the curse down. And the person who long preserved the story of this curse is Edie — a person who lost every family member she loved, from her parents to her grandchildren, to the “curse.”

Dawn’s attempt to separate her children from the “memory” of the curse was therefore, in the last instance, an effort to protect them from the curse itself. To cut them off from Edie’s memory — which said that Barbara was devoured by the monsters of horror films, that Walter was a mole-man, that Sven died not in an accident while building a dragon-shaped slide but fighting a dragon — must have been meant to free the children from the curse by letting them live their own lives, unpossessed by the thought of it.

Yet Edie’s effort to preserve the memory of the curse may have been her effort to accept the countless losses she had lived through. Perhaps it was to honor her family — to commemorate that they were not simply so many humans who brushed past this earth, but beings each precious, each with a name and a character and a life of their own. This was work that only Edie — the one person alive who carried the memory of them — could do. The family curse that was, to some, a terror was Edie’s way of remembering and honoring the family’s history.

[Fig. 4] Edie set up shrines honoring the family in every space where their lives had dwelt.

The singular deaths of this family — deaths whose manner mirrored the shape of a life — do not appear among the family who left the house after Edie’s death. Deaths that could not remain as Edie’s shrines do not become playable stages. Perhaps they are ordinary deaths; perhaps they are the escape from the curse. And yet — perhaps, passed through Edie’s memory, their deaths too might take another shape.

“If we lived forever, maybe we’d understand.”

Just as a new generation of Finches began when Odin, migrating to a new land, sank into the sea with the old house, so a new generation began again when Edie left the world and the house was abandoned. As the family’s history in Norway remained as a roof poking up from the old house sunk off the shore, the family’s history in the Orcas Island house remained as a single journal, written by Edith. Forgetting is memory’s inevitable last state. As time passes and generations turn, the memory will thin and fade, slip ever lower in the order of things, and finally vanish. In the end the Finches will no longer know where they came from, or why. The story of the curse, too, will be forgotten.

Because family cannot be chosen, the family’s memory cannot be chosen either. If Lewis set his heart more on his father’s Indian ancestry, it was to put distance between himself and the Finch family — to get free of this community, the memory it held, and its way of handling that memory. Yet in the end he returned to the house and met an extraordinary death, so it seems he did not slip the curse after all. The memory accumulated in the community called family cannot be pleasant through and through. Every so often the shames, the sordid rumors, the knots of ugly feeling, death, and loss work their way in. And so someone accepts it, and someone struggles to escape it.

The memory of loss becomes, for one person, a curse; the curse becomes, for another, mourning; and the mourning remains, for another still, a terror that follows one for life. The strange house holding all these memories is full of deaths that hold lives, and the one woman who kept the house her whole life records them quietly and honors those who left — so that they remain not merely the dead, but people who truly walked this earth and lived lives of many colors. As the work shows not the fact of their deaths but another’s memory of those deaths, their deaths become less events than the endings of people who once lived, and are now sufficient to be remembered. Not extraordinary enough to leave a name by their lives — but entirely sufficient to remain, for a while, in another’s head.