House of the Dragon: Episode Eight

we will remember him

Welcome new readers! I hope you’re not expecting more small press drama.

Have you bought my book yet? Want to read the first twelve chapters for free?

Catch up with what’s come before:

• Episode One

• Episode Two

• Episode Three

• Episode Four

• Episode Five

• Episode Six

• Episode Seven

My father is dying. He’s been dying for a while, his body diminishing, becoming so much less than it was.

His body is becoming a cage.

This happened to his mother, my grandmother. She didn’t die until she was 92, but her body gave up years before that. Her mind, though, remained.

Was that a blessing or curse? To be so fully aware of the ways you’ve become shackled in meat?

My grandmother remembered everything in her life. She once described a trip to the grocery store from before I was born in such minute detail to me that I thought she had lost her mind. The absolute banality of the story felt obscene, as if she was trying to destroy me.

Every memory was the same size to her. And she remembered everything. Whether it was the end of World War II or the birth of her children or a very normal and mundane bowel movement in 1953, they all held the same weight in her memory. She remembered all of them the same way and she remembered them all of the time.

If you’re willing, bring to mind one of the many embarrassing moments of your life. Maybe the one that most recently struck you at midnight and kept you awake for an extra hour. Now imagine remembering not just one of those moments, but all of them, and then imagine remembering them all the time.

My father has begun forgetting. He never had his mother’s memory—few people do—but the epilepsy, the strokes, and the medications all work together to cause him to slide away from himself. From the person he was. From the person he wants to be.

His father died when he was eight years old of a stroke. My grandmother said that he had become extremely difficult to live with in his final years.

My mother always wondered what that meant.

She doesn’t anymore. She believes my father’s been having strokes for far longer than we thought.

My father’s half-sister died twenty years ago of a stroke.

A few months ago after one of his strokes, he forced me to help him up to his bed to lie down. He told me to turn the paramedics away when they arrived because he would refuse to see them, was upset that we called them as he was having his stroke. He told me his father died of a stroke. His sister died of a stroke. He, too, will die of a stroke.

He often tells my mother that he’s going to die today. He’s been doing it for a long time.

Dying has changed him. Strokes often cause personality changes, or so I’ve been told. My father’s personality has definitely changed, albeit gradually, over the years. Previous to all of this, I had often wondered if he’s simply become meaner, more paranoid, more prone to conspiratorial thinking just as a function of aging. And maybe he has. Maybe he always would have ended up as this withering angry man near blinded by pain and trapped in his home. Trapped in his body.

But I do remember a different version of my father. One from not even that long ago. A happier man. A gentler man. One better at controlling his emotions, his anger. One who rarely forgot. One who tried always to make peace with his family, between his children. One who wasn’t so often tedious and confused. One who laughed often and smiled easy.

He still laughs, sometimes. He still smiles, sometimes.

My mother’s father taught my father what it was to be a man, to be a father. He had had no model before his father-in-law’s friendship. He converted to Catholicism the same year my grandfather died. Since fathers are our models for god, this has always made sense to me. In losing a surrogate father, he found a new one.

He clings to his faith even as he loses control of everything else.

We have prepared for his death. We have lived through his death a number of times.

It will shatter my mother. Possibly it will shatter me and my siblings. We have prepared for it, yet we will never be prepared for his death.

Broken and tired. He longs for death.

His body is a cage that he will never break free from until the end. Just like his mother. Just like his father.

His brothers came to visit last weekend. They stayed in my house. My father refused to see them. He has refused to see them for four years. He does not want to reconcile with them. He never wants to see them again.

His brothers don’t understand. They want to. They love him. Have loved him. Have loved him the only way brothers can love one another.

They have relied on each other since their father died when they were all children. The youngest of his brothers was an infant when my grandfather died. He only knows his father through the stories told to him by his brothers, his mother, his uncles and aunts and cousins.

They came last year too. They asked me why their brother won’t see them.

How to make them understand?

How to make anyone understand?

My father has told me the reason. It is a very dumb one. A very bad one. It’s almost obscene to sever a relationship over something so stupid, so small.

Or, not almost. It is obscene. It is cruel and it is senseless.

His brothers love him. They would do anything to repair this relationship.

I almost wept when my uncle turned to me after hours of sitting around our table, laughing and sharing stories, and said, “I want to know you and I want you to know me. I want your kids to know me. That’s why we’re here.”

I cry now writing this down. Typing it for all of you to read. I will cry again reading this tomorrow when the email arrives in my inbox. My own words written by me, sent to me, to tell me of what I typed yesterday, of the things I thought so recently.

This newsletter, in many ways, is a cyclone of memories for me. As I’ve said often, me no remember so good. The opposite problem that my grandmother had.

I remember so little of the things that have happened to me, of the things I’ve done, of the things I’ve said and felt, and yet certain moments burn so bright that they take my breath away. The memories of certain experiences have scorched great holes into the temporal fabric of my life, leaving me with only these overwhelming moments.

Some have grown so large in my memory that they have come to define much of who I have become. Memories large as gods. Experiences swelling like an ocean that pulls me under, fills my lungs.

Memories I will never escape. Like ghosts, forever haunting every waking moment.

I remember my uncles and my father. I remember the easy love between them. I remember their love for me like a molten fist inside my chest that keeps me from breathing. Seeing the love they have for my son adds another molten fist to the first and I try not to cry from the way my uncle held my seven month old in his arms, looked into his face, and smiled.

I will always remember what he said next when he turned to me.

It is so little.

It is so much.

My father hurts himself. He kills himself by refusing his brothers.

But, too, he kills them.

He will die so he will not have to live with the regret of never reconciling with them. But they will live. They will live and even though it’s not their choosing, even though they want to see him, want to speak to him again, want to heal whatever damage they may have caused, it is they who will forever regret that they never reconciled.

That their brother died without them.

A family, broken. In truth, it has never been the same since my grandmother died. That was the last time I saw many of my cousins.

My family is spread out over several states. Even growing up, even when my father and his brothers were close, sometimes a year or two would go by without me seeing them.

My mother has been estranged from most of her family for most of my life. Ever since her father died when I was four years old.

My only extended family has always been my father’s side. Growing up, I was about a decade younger than most of my cousins and they lived far away, so my immediate family has always been the only family I have truly known, and even the six of us have never been particularly close, in the way so many families that I’ve known have been close.

I love them. My brothers. My sister. My parents. My two cousins that grew up with me. But we are, in so many ways, so far away from one another.

Everyone’s family is strange and strained. It sounds stupid to say the following, but I do believe that it’s true: my family is unusually broken. A multilevel, multigenerational fracturing caused by the choices of so many different people over so many decades that tracing its origin is not only impossible but also useless.

Would that life could be so simple, to have only one reason for your family to shatter.

If only there were one choice to regret. Only one relationship that needed to be salvaged. Only one way to watch your heart break.

And so when this episode of House of the Dragon came on a few hours after my uncles left, I was unprepared for the journey ahead.

For those following along, I have loved Viserys since the first moment he appeared on screen. Watching him wither from week to week has often reminded me of my father. Watching him smile and try to hold his family together has actually reminded me of the man my father once was.

The man who forgave his brothers so many slights and chose to love them, even when, maybe, they didn’t deserve that love.

But I have not been blind to the way these two men—one real, one imagined—have diverged so far from one another.

I was stunned to silence when Viserys entered the throne room to save his daughter. Even inside, a great silence filled me. A thoughtless void where I was only a creature on a couch drinking this in.

Such a thunderous moment. A level of awe and power more often associated with epic victories, but used here to capture us as we watch a dying, broken man hobble towards a dream of salvation.

My heart began breaking when his brother, Daemon, picked up his crown, helped him to sit upon the throne that has robbed him of his life, of peace, of happiness.

My heart did not stop breaking at that astounding dinner scene where Paddy Considine took the Emmy from its future shelf and placed it in his pocket. Watching a shattered man refuse to break broke me.

Broke me for the broken man that I know.

His dying plea, begging his family to heal, broke me yet further for all the ways the broken man I know has not said these words.

And, yes, all of Viserys is failure.

As I’ve said before, I love stories of failure. I am obsessed with them.

House of the Dragon’s first season really is the story of Viserys’ long failure.

But we see every choice and every move made and not made, and we understand. We don’t even blame him. He is a man who wants his family to love one another. He wants to set his family in order before he dies. And he has been dying for a long, long time.

And as I sit here typing now, on Sunday, hours before I watch how his family shatters completely now that he’s gone, I’m reminded of my uncles driving away and the words they said to me. The words they said to my wife. To my sons.

I’m reminded of memory, both my own and my grandmother’s.

I’m reminded of my grandfather’s funeral that happened when I was six months older than my son is now.

I’m reminded of fathers and gods and the way I begged as a child in the deepest, darkest night of the soul to be forgiven for all the ways we are broken and for all the ways I will continue to break and how I waited, hoping to hear those simple words that may have made so many differences in the life I have since lived and forgotten.

And so I say it now because I may not say it when the time comes, when you most need to hear it, when you most need to know that your life has not been one of failure.

I forgive you.

I will remember you.

Wolf.

Howl.