Honor
It is a word that seems passe or reactionary to many twenty-first century ears. When I think of honor, I often first think of “honor culture,” or a kind of society in which minor insults to one’s “honor” or the honor of one’s family are met with violent retaliation. But something important about honor gets lost in this. Honor doesn’t just involve justifying violence; and it’s not just a “pre-modern” way of doing things to be replaced. Zooming out, it is fundamentally about how we live, and even more so, how we die. What it means to live an honorable life is something that people have argued about for millennia (and perhaps something religious traditions and life philosophies have helped provide answers to). But what does it mean to die honorably? We honor the memories of people who died in battle, for example. Critics of this see it as glorifying war (again, equating honor with violence). But I think we (also) honor those who died in battle because they sacrificed themselves for an ideal, an institution, a nation, something bigger than themselves (and something we share, benefit from, or hold in high esteem).
Many cultures and traditions have ideas about what happens after we die, with an often-sharp divide between the honored and dishonored dead. In a less abstract sense, people are remembered by, and continue to influence, other people for how they lived and died. It's kind of a weird thought, that we are so heavily influenced by the dead throughout our lives. But we obviously are. The influence of the dead seems to be even more powerful than the influence of the living. All the traditions and stories and myths and art and artifacts that people leave behind. We honor these aspects of people in a lot of different ways after they’re gone, independently of what we think happens after we die.
We may disagree, perhaps strongly, about what happens after we die, or even about the details of what it means to live an honorable life. I do not know what happens after we die, but suspect based on what is known about brains and bodies and consciousness that we do not consciously survive the death of our bodies in some enduring sense. I do not know in detail what it means to live an honorable life, such that I could spell out what you ought to be doing; I fear people who are unwaveringly certain they can, and the often-destructive consequences (intended or not) of their self-righteousness. If you were to apply your standard of honor to me, I would probably fall short. I am not a good guy. Or a bad guy. The world is rarely that black-and-white.
Honor helps to make sense of things when someone close to us dies. And again, we may disagree about the details of certain moral or otherworldly questions, but we still are left with the grief of loss and a struggle to make sense of it. Losing someone is going to influence us whether we want it to or not. If I am used to regularly visiting someone and then don’t get to visit them anymore, I am left with an afterimage that I carry with me of those visits, as well as a sense of loss when confronted by something I used to do, but no longer do. Maybe this is why we bury our dead in some cultures—so we can continue to visit them after they’re gone. I went fishing with my grandpa as a kid, but he died when I was nine years old. I didn’t go fishing much after that, but I still visit his grave from time to time. I remember driving with family to Oklahoma to visit my grandmother and my uncle. They’re both gone now, and I seldom find myself in Oklahoma. I’ve lost a lot of people in my life so far, but probably no more than the average middle-aged person. And the urgency of having to make sense of that grief and loss seems ever more important with age, as I suspect I will lose far more people who are even closer to me, in the future—close relatives, friends, and loved ones—than I did in the past. That’s just life as a social critter like we humans are—the longer we live, the more people we get to know and the more, and deeper, bonds, we form over time. This is why I’m thinking about honor—what specifically it means to honor the dead, and why it is so important to do so.
What makes for the depth of grief or loss is how many habits we developed through our interactions. And maybe it’s not even a human; my dog, Chewie, died late in January, and I have been able to talk about little else in writing over the past few months. In fact, it has been harder to write anything at all than it has ever been for me since I started writing at age 7. I spent more time with him over the past almost 8 years than any person, except, perhaps, my wife. And our favorite thing to do together was walk. Miles of walking. Almost every single day. As summer approaches it cuts deeper. Neither of us liked excessive heat or direct sunlight, but when we weren’t walking, there were countless other little things. When I read a book, he would sometimes sleep on my feet. When I had my morning coffee, he would come nuzzle his head against my leg. When he felt ignored, he would paw at or lie on the books and printed research articles piled up beside my chair.
Putting together what I know about the social world and being human, when we lose someone, we can make sense of loss simply trying to consciously honor their memory. Not just by thinking about them, but in our actions. I want the lessons I learned from my college mentors (two of whom have now passed away) to be reflected, in a practical sense, in what I do with my life after they’re gone. But it’s relatively easy for me to see how to honor them, especially since I became an academic myself. It’s not that much harder to figure out how to honor the memories of family members who lived to a ripe old age, as well as friends whose lives were cut tragically short, as honoring a person’s memory involves learning from both their triumphs and missteps. When I die, I want people to have learned at least as much from what I did wrong as what I did right so they can get it a little less wrong than I did.
But how do I honor the memory of a 30-pound terrier who appeared in our lives quite unexpectedly and enriched our lives immeasurably before passing away, after what was (in dog years) a long life, and a good life? It is sometimes hard to do what I once did—so many memories of him in so many places. As we slowly pack up and give away all his stuff, I resist making new memories that overwrite the old. I want to hang onto him as I hang onto the memories of all the people who have inspired me over the years. But it’s vexing in some ways. And maybe unhealthy. I am not sure why this has continued to be so hard for me compared to the things I’ve seen, done, dealt with in life so far. At times, I have even become enraged thinking about going for walks, because I get so much peace from it, but at times cannot square that peace with the grief.
Oddly, when I get past those difficult emotions and go for a walk, I feel a lot better. The ground beneath my feet, the swelling of green as the ice has retreated in May. All those little spots where we used to wade into the lake to cool off. It feels like he’s with me out there. Not in some otherworldly sense, but a memory that I get to carry with me. It was one hell of a journey, but all journeys end. Perhaps when the way is unclear or difficult, we can honor those we love is to keep going, to not let the grief overwhelm us, stymie our hopes or cast a shadow over all those meaningful places and times and experiences. Because maybe honor is, most fundamentally, about finding the courage to keep going.
Notes:
McCaffree, Kevin. “Honor, Dignity, Victim: A Tale of Three Moral Cultures.” Skeptic, https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/honor-dignity-victim-cultures/
Photo: Chewie, sleeping on Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion and John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, my home office in Lawrence, Kansas, 2018.
