{"id":14073,"date":"2023-09-27T13:37:08","date_gmt":"2023-09-27T20:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=14073"},"modified":"2025-01-06T10:00:20","modified_gmt":"2025-01-06T18:00:20","slug":"talktosylvia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/27\/talktosylvia\/","title":{"rendered":"Talking to Sylvia"},"content":{"rendered":"

[I revised this September 28, 2023 post on January 4, 2025.]<\/em><\/p>\n

As you may know, my wife Sylvia died of cancer in January 6, 2023. I\u2019m still grieving, and I miss her very much. Over the last eight months, I\u2019ve returned many times to the question of what it might mean to say Sylvia\u2019s soul is still with me. In this post, I\u2019ll outline some of my ever-changing thoughts.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The least comforting viewpoint is that when you die, you die. Like a light being turned off. Like a decades-long movie hitting a jump-cut…with nothing on the other side. Maybe it\u2019s like going under total anesthesia and never waking up.<\/p>\n

Some of you will have had anesthesia. When you rise out of the black in the post-op room, it\u2019s as if no time elapsed. Unlike after sleep, you don\u2019t seem to have had any intervening dreams. Jump-cut. But, as I say, if you\u2019re dying, it could well be that there\u2019s nothing on the other side.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It\u2019s certainly reasonable to entertain the lights-out view of death. In our time we tend to think of consciousness as an epiphenomenon<\/em>. Something that flickers within a living body like flames within a campfire. A computation being carried out by the brain and the physical body. If the body\u2019s gone, there\u2019s no more computation. No more epiphenomenon. No more you. Dead is dead.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t like thinking that. No point trying to be all tough and hardcore. You\u2019re gonna die away. So why not believe something that makes you happy?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The most obvious solution is the traditional one: a dead person has a soul that lives on. Like an angel or a ghost. An insubstantial, yet living,\u00a0 form that spends a lot of time off in heaven, but who is sometimes here with us, unseen, but real.<\/p>\n

And I can get into that. We don’t know what the world really is. Anything’s possible.<\/p>\n

It seems like the soul spends more and more time up in heaven as the years roll on and our memories fade. For years when I’d look up at the night sky, I’d imagine my parents to be up there, kindly looking down, like smiling stars. But now I don’t do that as often with my parents. They’re further away and, one might say, closer to God.<\/p>\n

As for Sylvia,\u00a0 she’s still close, not up in the sky all the time. For the first few months, she was in a corer by the ceiling in the living room, just over the spot where she died.\u00a0 Now she’s more like a person I know is standing next to me, just out of sight. Not always there, but sometimes. A benevolent presence.\u00a0 Reading over my shoulder right now.<\/p>\n

Hi, Sylvia.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

[You can find info about the paintings in this post on my Paintings<\/a> page.]<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing this part of the post on my laptop as I sit on a bench in the Los Gatos town park. It\u2019s Sunday. Around me is the weekly Farmer\u2019s Market. Hundreds of people, scores of booths, music, sun and shadow. Tonight the park will be empty. This week\u2019s market event will be dead.<\/p>\n

Or will it? Even if we don’t believe in ghosts, a very weak way past the dead-is-dead stance is to espouse a spacetime view of the world, then nothing is really gone<\/em>. It\u2019s just a little farther back along the time axis. The universe is a static block of spacetime, and time is not in fact passing. The passage of time is a persistent illusion that we humans have at each and every cross-section of spacetime. We\u2019re always there, and we\u2019re always wrong about thinking the past is gone.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I once had the chance to ask Kurt G\u00f6del, \u201cWhat causes the illusion of the passage of time?\u201d\u009d Along with friend Albert Einstein, G\u00f6del was one of the deepest thinkers of the 20th century. His answer: \u201cThe illusion results from confusing the given with the real.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

So, sure, maybe, but that\u2019s pretty abstract. If you\u2019re grieving over a dead person or, for that matter, dreading your own death, the spacetime viewpoint is thin gruel indeed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Cue corny anecdote. My preacher father liked to tell the story of a little boy who\u2019s frightened by a night thunderstorm, and he runs to his parents\u2019 room and gets into their bed. \u201cCan\u2019t you just pray to God?\u201d\u009d says the father. \u201cHe\u2019s always with you.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there\u2019s a storm,\u201d\u009d said the boy, \u201cI need someone with skin on<\/em>.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

And, sigh, ghosts don’t have skin.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

[Recent portrait by Bart Nagel<\/em><\/p>\n

About two weeks ago I drove up to SF to have dinner with John Shirley, Paul Mavrides, Hal Robbin, and some of the other cyberpunk\/SubGenius types. Cozy. John\u2019s wife Mickey was very emotional about how much she loved Sylvia, and how she now misses her. I told her Sylvia is alive in my head, and for a about a minute we got into this thing where Mickey was talking directly to Sylvia through my glassy, wide-open eyes. We were doing a routine.<\/p>\n

Mickey goes \u201cHi Sylvia.\u201d\u009d And I raise my voice and say, \u201cHi Mickey,\u201d\u009d and it feels real…but then it’s too creepy to keep going.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Coincidentally, the next day my grief and loneliness were at a peak\u2014it comes and goes, maybe like a sneaker-wave that douses me on a beach. Sylvia, Sylvia, Sylvia. She\u2019s gone for good. She’s always with me.<\/p>\n

Certainly one way that Sylvia is still present is via the children and grandchildren.\u00a0 Each of them has certain traits or looks that come from Sylvia. Sometimes when I catch a glimpse of one of my daughters I’ll think, for a split second, that I’m seeing\u00a0Sylvia.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In a related way, when I’m with the family and we’re talking and reminiscing and joking it’s as if Sylvia is still part of the conversation. Her figures of speech, her opinions, her laughter, her questions, her comments—all of these are echoed in our little group.<\/p>\n

Here’s a recent painting of our family members. We’re all about one inch tall and we’re in a little boat in rapid, turbulent water, going past big frogs and lurking squid.\u00a0 Our current life in a nutshell?<\/p>\n

(It’s just the OG family, no grandkids, but I threw in our departed dog Arf, and Isabel’s lost dog Rivers.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Last week when I was visiting SF, Rudy Jr and I went and got treats with his three kids at the nearly empty St. Francis Fountain shop on 24th St in the Mission. The shop isn\u2019t a Disney-park reconstruction, but simply a 1940s soda shop that happens to remain. I felt a stabbing feeling that I might call \u201ctime pain\u201d\u009d. Like \u201cheimweh\u201d\u009d in German, literally “home pain,” meaning homesickness. “Time pain” is my try at temporal equivalent of that. Paint at being separated from an earlier time. Oh, hell, you could just say nostalgia.<\/p>\n

The simple pleasure of the grandkids, young with their whole lives ahead of them, and not even knowing that fact, or\u00a0thinking about it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

[This spherical sculpture is by my friend Dick Termes<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019d prefer not to be a grieving parent who continually discusses his loss with the kids and grandkids. Maybe I\u2019ll get there. So far they don\u2019t seem to mind or resent my bringing it up. It\u2019s still present in their minds as well. I hope in a year or two it\u2019ll damp down, at least somewhat.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Now a different take on what the afterlife might be. I have a very good model of Sylvia in my head. A human brain is, at least for now, the best possible \u201ccomputer\u201d\u009d for simulating a human. And I have an immense data base on Sylvia.<\/p>\n

As an SF writer and a computer maven, it occurs to me that my brain can run a simulation of Sylvia. What I call a \u201clifebox\u201d\u009d in my nonfiction tome The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul<\/a>. <\/em>Or you might listen to my UC Santa Cruz podcast on Lifebox Immortality<\/a>\u00a0 And my most recent novel Juicy Ghosts<\/em> <\/a>is about a big company renting out lifebox slots in their cloud silo.\u00a0 Rent-A-Soul.<\/p>\n

I even designed a “Rudy’s Lifebox<\/a>” wepbage which you can use online to emulate me. Go try it.\u00a0 Go to the input box on the Rudy’s Lifebox page and enter: Sylvia’s lifebox.\u00a0 Check out some of the links that you get.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But let’s talk about an internally-generated “no tech” lifebox, as I was just starting to say.<\/p>\n

I got nudge toward the “no tech lifebox” idea when I recently had Bob Hearn for lunch\u2026he\u2019s a computer programmer, also into mysticism and Buddhism, goes to Burning Man, and he gets ecstatic satori by running ultramarathons\u2014when I saw him he was preparing for a trip to Greece to run 150 miles from Athens to Sparta in 30 hours. An only-in-silicon-valley guy.<\/p>\n

I told Bob my notion that Sylvia exists as a lifebox simulation in my brain, and he said, why think of it as a simulation? Why not say it\u2019s real<\/em>? Reality is, after all, a completely fluid and arbitrary and in-the-eye-of-the-beholder thing. If all the Sylvia processes are in place, why not say it\u2019s an actual Sylvia.<\/p>\n

And as I said, for forty years I’ve been writing SF stories and novels where a dead person is still alive, in the form of some software running on a machine or in the cloud or on some wetware organism.\u00a0 And, again, my brain is considerably richer than any of the bits’n’chips computers foreseeable anytime soon. So of course my brain can run a farly accurate emulation of Sylvia.<\/p>\n

And again, as for the data base, I know very much about Sylvia, having been married to her for 55 years.\u00a0 I have a rich data base of audio and video and photos and the words and voice-tones and facial expressions, yes, all the words.\u00a0 More than enough to base a lifebox simulation on. And not just all these dry facts, the waves of emotion, the dancing, the outings, the walks on the hills.<\/p>\n

Yes, it’s safe to say that I do have a version of Sylvia living inside me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And now I\u2019m fooling with this insight, opening up to it, and it makes me feel much better than I did a few days ago.<\/p>\n

The Sylvia who lives within me isn\u2019t just a model that I can contemplate. She’s a living being who I can talk to and, more importantly, this inner Sylvia can respond.<\/p>\n

“Hi, Ru!”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A side benefit having a live Sylvia on hand it that, that, when the remorse-loop stage of grieving gets to me, I can apologize to the inner Sylvia for the things I did wrong.<\/p>\n

And if Sylvia is in some sense alive, she’s likely to accept my apology, as she was kind and generous.\u00a0 Or\u00a0 maybe she doesn’t accept the apology and she wants to talk about it some more…and that’s okay too. That’s what we’d do.\u00a0 Either way, once I run through the process of “talking to Sylvia,” I’m all okay for a while.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Here’s a photo of Sylvia and me, in the form of\u00a0 two logs. In the last months, we’d lie together like that in the mornings, close as close can be, hugging, desperate, terrified.<\/p>\n

And now I’m thinking of one of the very last mornings in our bed, before she started sleeping alone in a hospital bed in the living-room upstairs. We were hugging, as I say, and throwing our legs over each other in a casual way, mixing them together, the legs also like those\u00a0 logs.<\/p>\n

And then Sylvia says, her voice breaking, “You’ve been so nice to me, Rudy, through all this, taking care of me, it’s been so hard, and you stuck with me, and it makes me want to say I forgive you for all the mean things you ever did…and maybe I shouldn’t even say this…but I do.”<\/p>\n

And that’s a good thing for me to remember. We already made our peace before she died.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Going back to the general notion that a version of Sylvia is in some sense truly alive within my mind, I discussed this with my therapist at my bi-weeklly grief counselling session on Zoom.<\/p>\n

And he says, yes, of course that\u2019s true. We\u2019re not just alive on this<\/em> level. You might even say that we have a higher body\u2014the subtle body, or astral body, or causal body\u2014why not just call it the soul. And given that Sylvia was so tightly bound to me during her life, then of course her soul is with me.<\/p>\n

One more touch. Besides the counseling, I was in a grief group for a few weeks, and I was talking to the others about my\u00a0 notion of being able to talk to a living Sylvia in my head, and a woman said, \u201cWell, of course. My husband will always be alive in my heart.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s warmer than saying Sylvia’s soul is a life-box-emulation process in my brain. Being an SF writer and CS professor, I tend to have this fixation on brains <\/em>as opposed to the whole body. But, yes, saying heart<\/em> is a fuller expression of what it’s all about.<\/p>\n

So alright! Sylvia’s in my heart. Problem solved.<\/p>\n

Light beamed from madman\u2019s stark, staring eyes, as if he were a jack-o\u2019-lantern with a flare within.<\/em><\/p>\n

And that’s me. No, no, just kidding, this post isn\u2019t meant to be creepy SF. I’m thinking about something much cozier than that. Like…me sitting outside on the side porch, late afternoon, nice sun, quietly chatting aloud with Sylvia. Getting her caught up on what’s happened around here. Or sitting by her grave for an hour and telling her the news. And the mountains in the background, and the open sky above, and her shiny gravestone.\u00a0 Talking feels good.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a lovely little poem by Sylvia. I found in a tiny spiral notebook in her car. It just kills me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll always love you, dear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[I revised this September 28, 2023 post on January 4, 2025.] As you may know, my wife Sylvia died of cancer in January 6, 2023. I\u2019m still grieving, and I miss her very much. Over the last eight months, I\u2019ve returned many times to the question of what it might mean to say Sylvia\u2019s soul […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14073"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14357,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14073\/revisions\/14357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}