S-Town Reflection: Deadlines
I am a podcast person, so it shouldn’t be a surprise the S-town appealed to me. As a bonus it had a wonderful narrative feel, poetic stakes, and this melancholic feel that tied the whole thing together.
Which is an awful way to talk about someone’s death.
At least for me, because John B McLemore was a person and I see him more as a poem. Which isn’t the worst thing a person could be compared to, but it is a pretty reductive view of an entire person’s life. I just know him as this tragic figure who struggles to fight all the evils he sees in the world at once and ultimately dies lost in his own labyrinth. Except that is not really what happened. Regardless of the good John worked for and his demonstrated flair for dramatics, he died for his own reasons, not to be a poem for me to contemplate. I don’t know him as a person, I just know a few of his words.
Which gets me wondering about what I owe the dead, what does anyone? How does that change for people I know as compared to people I don’t? How do I want to be remembered? Do I want to be?
Ugh. That makes me feel all morbid and gross to say, but I feel like it is the underlying thought of S-Town. John B McLemore might not be someone I know, but at least now he is someone I know about. S-Town gave him a legacy and a memorial that will last hopefully a way beyond him and make one more divided in his honor. Lots of people seem deeply concerned with being remembered or marked in some way after their deaths, and maybe this is a way of achieving that. By the same token, I may not know much about the various buildings and memorials, but I see them and know about them because of actions taken by friends and family of the departed to make sure they have a legacy. As someone separated from these individuals, I can’t say I know much about them aside from kind and quiet words in marble in front of the entrance to the museum or written on various benches and buildings. That said, a lot of work goes into etching lives into the stones around me, and normally that seems fine. I don’t know those people, but the people involved did and that seems to make them feel better. Along those lines, S-Town starts to remind me of a funeral. I won’t go into too many details about my own experiences here, but hearing the voices of so many people talking about the life and events of a fallen friend’s life echoes these gatherings. Public and private stories alike start to circulate and around the room and it creates a closeness that is melancholic but . . . necessary in some way. Mourning in general has that constant weight to it.
Maybe this is a bit more public than most funerals, and I am uncomfortable with how many details of John B McElmore’s life come to life without his consent, but funerals. . . are not only for the dead at the end of the day. I’m not sure who, if anyone, might have needed to tell these stories quiet like this, and at certain point I think I might have to be okay with not knowing.
