Death broke on Cathexis, grief pushing lower articles Lyle had once enjoyed as it inched down the log in garish red sunset pictures and cross iconography. The mourners typed to his profile or on their own—we love you, Lyle—and the pictures ran his life. Alexandra looked at the photographs of him as a teenager, then one of him her son’s age. He held out a caterpillar in his palm, an offering.
In succinct online eulogies, classmates and old colleagues remembered him as always convicted. Sometimes, there was an instance. Other times, it was a habit. How when you got together, he’d ask what was the latest grievance. And he meant it. He wanted to know the worst.
In this way, he was reduced.
But what Alexandra returned to most was what his father Cathected. Mr. Michaels wrote his Ly, he remembered this one time when he went to see him give a debate. He didn’t know why he remembered it except he looked up on the stage that night. His son was never much at sports, not even cards. He was a whiner, he gave up too easy, he’d never been strong. But when he looked up that night, he didn’t see his son, the snotty little shit who never did what it takes. He saw a fighter orating like a president in a circle of light. There were flashes going off in the seats, all these people taking pictures. He saw heads nodding. He heard applause. This man was poking his voice in the hot auditorium, and he had everyone in there, was beating the other guy while everyone watched. Frank Michaels hadn’t known to see his kid that way, and then he did: his son had that survivor fire of their family, the Micelli fight in his heart, and it made Mr. Michaels want to punch his hand up in the air. He didn’t know what had happened to that. Why’d you have to do it, Ly? he wrote. We loved you.