Speak, Memories

The past talks to me often, even when I do not wish to listen.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

― John Banville, The Sea

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On November 28th, 2015, a man named Roman Mazurenko went for a walk with some friends in Moscow. He was in his mid-thirties and worked as the founder of a struggling startup called Stamply, a platform for launching online magazines. Mazurenko was in Moscow with his friend and co-founder Dimitri Ustinov. At one moment in their stroll through the city, they encountered a sidewalk blocked by construction equipment and decided to cross to the other side. Mazurenko stepped into the street first, simultaneously looking down to check a message on his phone. He did so just as a car came speeding in his direction, moving too fast to stop. Ustinov watched as Mazurenko was struck by the oncoming vehicle. Roman died that same day at a nearby hospital surrounded by Ustinov and several other friends.

Mazurenko’s close circle of technologists was devastated by his death, and they debated how best to memorialize Roman. To one friend, Eugenia Kudya, all the usual suggestions seemed inadequate, for she had become consumed by the need to speak to Roman again. At the time, she was developing an app that would allow users to interact with software bots, i.e., an interface for speaking with artificial intelligence machines. As she remembered the thousands of e-mails and texts from Roman that she and her friends possessed, she decided to upload them all into a bot. Using a new type of neural network, she trained the bot to communicate using Roman’s stored linguistic history. In essence, she taught the bot to speak to anyone as Roman would have, using his own words, syntax, and expressions.

Through artificial intelligence, Kudya brought a digital version of Roman back to life and they began to converse:

In Kudya’s mind, the bot was a success, and she made it available to anyone who wanted to chat with her dead friend. The app was downloaded by hundreds of people, including some who were unacquainted with Roman, and many users allowed Kudya to read the transcripts of their conversations. What she most often saw in the dialogues were people who wanted to say something to Roman that they had not said while he lived. For many other users, the app was a confessional, in which they could share secrets or say things they could not say to the living. Many of Roman’s friends came to feel that they really were communicating with Roman through the app and that its answers allowed them insight into his psychology—his unhappiness at work or his frustration with the way his life was going— that they had missed while he was alive. Kudya concluded that, even in death, the language of Roman’s past was able to provide—to anyone willing to listen—a new comprehension of his life and state of mind. The bot was a window into a human whose life had ended but who still had things to say. Reflecting on his experience with the Roman bot, Ustinov noted that it had allowed him to continue to learn about his friend. “We are still in the process of meeting Roman,” he said, and “it is beautiful.”

The story of Roman’s bot was told a few years ago. I recalled it this week as I read about a project at MIT called Augmented Eternity, which is developing a platform that would allow us to digitize ourselves, or someone else, so we can live on beyond our deaths, sharing our knowledge and wisdom with future generations. I have read about a similar effort that took place in Korea this year: a documentary team recreated a woman’s dead daughter in virtual reality, so the child’s mother could once again interact with her little girl, albeit in a whole new way. Similarly, a team at Amazon programmed Alexa to read a story to a child in his dead grandmother’s voice. AI can’t eliminate the pain of loss, said the project’s leader, but it can definitely “make the memories of those who survive last.” Through that article, I came across hereafter.ai, a new platform that allows one to digitize his words and images, so a person can give a digital version of himself to others as a gift or memento. I soon learned that there are other projects with similar goals around the world, which do not surprise me, for it is an ancient human wish to speak to our beloved departed. They often call to us from beyond the edge of life, asking, we may imagine, for one more moment in each other’s company.

The Roman Mazurenko bot is something I think about when I open the desk drawer in which I keep Enzo’s red iPhone. I have not looked through any of his messages or emails, and I sometimes wonder what they would say if they were loaded into an app that could allow me to converse with him again. What would I ask, and what would it reply? Would it be, as with Dimitri and Roman, a beautiful voyage of rediscovery, or would I learn things I did not want— or felt I had no right— to know? Would all those messages illuminate Enzo, or would they say more about me? If the latter, are those things I really want to hear?

The questions posed above are not easy for me to answer, for when a child dies, our memories of him or her speak to us in ways that are different than while the child lived. The memories of a living son or daughter are almost always experienced in the context of the present or future: we recall a conversation or act and see it with respect to the person who exists or we imagine will exist one day. We see the words and images of the past as an audience experiences scenes in a film: moments in a story that is unfolding, which makes it impossible to know fully what any one scene really means. If a child is dead, however, his or her story is finished, and we can understand fully how one part fits into the whole: whether it is of little consequence or if it resonates with the deep echoes of the child’s brief life. It is the difference between listening to a symphony for the first time or for the hundredth: in the former, we know not where each note fits; in the latter, we comprehend its place in the complete work. They are the same sonic expressions, but they can tell us very different things.

The point noted above was made eloquently by the Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov in his autobiography, Speak, Memory, and one passage, where he recalls a sunset from his childhood, captures the thought wonderfully:

I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle bell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the spare parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a family of serene clouds in miniature, an accumulation of brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me.

In Nabokov’s childhood, the sunset was just a sunset, in all likelihood unremarked at the time by the future artist. Later, as an old man looking back at his life, the moment—the memory—speaks to Nabokov, illuminating for him a point in his youth when all was promise and potential and the sorrows to come were part of a distant future. Likewise, for me, memories of Enzo speak in new ways than at their point of occurrence, and their revelations can be obvious or mysterious. It happened as I was buying groceries a few weeks ago when I came across an item that Enzo used to enjoy. Standing before it, I was transported to the moment when he first asked me to buy it and his urging me to enjoy it with him—a small gesture that seemed insignificant then but now spoke to me with joy out of the past. A week ago I was walking through a mall when suddenly I saw a young man sporting a University of Maryland sweatshirt. I stared at him as he strolled past, oblivious to my gaze, and I heard Enzo’s voice on the day he chose to attend UMD, a voice filled with the excitement of pursuing his dream to become a teller of stories. My memories spoke to me yet again this weekend as I watched Enzo’s beloved Argentina play in the World Cup. I recalled similar moments with him vividly, and I heard in the memory Enzo’s love for his mother’s native land. It so happened that his uncle Christian is in Qatar for the Cup, and he sent me a photo of a banner he hung in the stadium. “Enzo is present,” he said to me in a text message with the image. Seeing the photo, I sighed and wondered what my memories would say if, rather than seeing my son in the stands cheering with his uncle—which had been the plan—my eyes caught sight of the white and blue cloth that Christian hung in Enzo’s place with deep affection.

It is an inevitable consequence of losing a child that you will think of him or her constantly—much more than you ever did in life—and that endless rumination will lead you to discoveries you would not have had otherwise. This is a sad irony, of course: that it would take losing Enzo for me to meditate so deeply on the life of the boy who meant the world to me and for me to hear, sometimes for the first time, what many of his life’s moments were really saying.

Like Roman’s friends, I long to speak to Enzo. He too died in an accident, and I never had the chance to say farewell. At the very least, perhaps in a conversation with some digital version of him, I, and those who loved him, could say our goodbyes and express to him one last time everything he meant to us. It is not inconceivable that these new technologies might allow us to interact with Enzo through his own digital legacy, granting us new insights into our dead boy. Perhaps, as the interactions with Roman reproduced in this essay suggest, we could even create new memories, which, when added to Enzo’s “augmented eternity,” would create a new cycle of experience and remembrance.

I have just begun to consider the implications of a digital version of my lost son. In the meantime, there is something I do that mirrors obliquely the acts of the technologists. Every morning, I open a Google doc and write a memory of Enzo or speak to him directly in a message. Sometimes, I insert photos that say something special to me on that day. This document is, like the bot in Roman’s story, my own conversation with Enzo in the year following his death. I have so much to say to him, and this creation is my simple, analog way of saying it. I believe that each word that I write resonates back to me in my own memories, and perhaps it is especially powerful recollections that I input in the morning that my mind replies to later in the day.

So it is that each morning I speak to the dead, and sometimes they speak to me in return; it is a conscious, and subconscious, dialogue with my own memories. What I say is within my control, but what they reply is not. One day what they say can bring me to tears and another to a moment of peace. They can carry me deep into the past, where I often pause, like Nabokov, to reconsider the full import of an unremembered moment resurrected. We know now that memories we consider absent are really only dormant in our brains, lying in wait for the right signal to bring them back to our consciousness. My mind is therefore full of messages ready to be sent and received, unknown to me now, to be composed of my treasure of remembrances, their arrival illuminating a boy whose life is now complete and a man whose final day is yet to come. As painful as it can be, I must and will hear what these memories have to say, taking in their meaning as best I can, wishing only that they had spoken to me long ago.

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