No Room For Death in Society

The other reason why i put the dedication is that I think there's no room for death in society, and this fact adds to the pain of people who've lost someone. What I mean is that there is no time and place in everyday life where you can just go "oh by the way my brother died when i was 18", it's just not the done thing, and yet the consequence is that you find yourself bang in the middle of a dinner at someone's place and they ask you if you've got any brothers and sisters and you think (or at least that's what i think) "oh shit, well i'm not going to lie about this one" and you tell them the truth, and the meal is spoilt for everyone.

Alternatively no such dinner ever happens and it's even worse, because you can see people for years and if they're not curious about your life then they never learn something which is more often than not one of the most essential facts of your life. so I'm pleased as well because this dedication is a bit like coming out in a way.

Finally i think that you're only really dead when no one thinks of you. Last summer, I saw a concert of Bach's suites for cello in a church in Paris and at the end I almost felt like Bach was with us. I don't mean with us in the church, but that in a way his music was so incredible that he wasn't really dead, he was alive through the music. I hope this doesn’t sound too dodgy or that I don’t sound like a mad woman, I think that people who really love music will understand what I mean by this. And then I thought of how the reverse was also true: if no one knows that you exist and no one cares about you then I suppose you could feel as if you were dead already. So in a way I think that each time someone reads the dedication to my brother, they learn that someone named Frederic lived from 1973 to 1994. He happens to be the brother of the person whose record they've just bought, but the dedication is not about me, it really is about my brother and how he has lived and how he is no longer alive and how his life shouldn't be completely forgotten.

I will write more about this later. I want to connect it with my favorite theorist Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller."