This is a sad story.
It was this time last year that my wife, who was pregnant, and I learned that we were going to have a baby boy, our son Theo. We also learned that day that he had the genetic condition Trisomy 18, also known as Edward’s Syndrome. His prognosis was most likely death before delivery, or at the very best up to two years of life, and even then after multiple complex surgeries. His heart only had one chamber. His little tummy had an opening that his intestines poked through. His eyes would never open. Over the next 4 months, we spiraled through grief as the child we had prepared our hearts and home for grew day by day, and persisted through impossible challenges, knowing that this journey’s end could come at any time. But he held on for a long time. Long enough to be born into this world and be held by his mother and father. I felt his heartbeat, held all of him in my gloved hands and awed eyes. Felt it stutter, and stop. He passed in my wife and I’s embrace on December 21st, the Winter Solstice. The longest night of the year.
As that date slowly but surely approaches for the first time since we welcomed and parted with Theo, I look back to the brief moment of pure joy when I knew my son was my son, before the descent into the hell this last year has been.
I channeled the grief I felt with his passing, through a fugue state, into the only form of art I know how to create in earnest: cooperate storytelling. I wrote a tabletop roleplaying game.
Influencing me were almost hallucinatory moments of revisiting my own childhood, of the good memories between the well-sown seeds of trauma. One of those was the night I first played the game Halo 3 ODST. A bully turned best friend had gotten me to convince my mom to buy Halo 3 for me the year before, and it had captivated my 10 year old autism like few hyperfixations before or after it. Every day I played custom games with friends, worked through the campaign I had absolutely no context for, or tried my hardest to make the ultimate forge map. It was, through the rose colored glasses of nostalgia, the happiest I had ever felt up to that moment in my life. And that seemed to peak when Halo 3’s sole story DLC, ODST, was released in 2009.
ODST was completely different from Halo 3, but in a way that fascinated my young mind to no end. It was moody, it was depressing, it was isolating. Compared to the grand set pieces and action shots of Halo 3, which only served to reinforce the heroic nature of the player, Halo 3 ODST is a much more subdued and cerebral game, one that I wouldn’t fully appreciate until years later but still loved then nonetheless. ODSTs are supposed to be this badass fighting force, sure, but time and time again throughout the story you’re reminded of their mortality, of their humanity, of the grim reality they find themselves struggling to survive in. And this left an impression on me, so much so that in the moment my mind was forced to grapple with the greatest sense of loss I’ve ever felt, the frail final heartbeats of my son freshly bored into the memory of my flesh, my mind retreated there to escape the pain. And it’s where my mind would stay, through interludes of emptiness and mourning from the depths of my soul, until what I had written was completed.
I call it SPRL: Earthbound
SPRL, pronounced “spiral,” stands for Special Projects, Recon, and Logistics, and is the non-copyrighted equivalent of the shadowy intelligence network known as ONI in Halo canon. The second part of the title, “Earthbound,” refers to the the nature of the player’s characters, which will more than likely be ODST equivalents known as HARRTs, or “High-Altitude Rapid Response Troopers.” Most of the system is based off of the CY_BORG game engine, but a lot of it is my own, such as an asymmetrical introduction, a three-tiered Encounter/Discovery/Flashback scene structure, and a limited number of such scenes before we determine whether or not this is the way the world ends.
I’d love to play it someday, but it seems like an ill fit for either of my game groups. I wish I could share it with others somehow, but lack the typing skills and patience to translate it to a digital project. And I’ve always really just been a writer, not a typist. I’ve got bundles of notebooks that just sit there. Maybe someday someone will go through my things, and digitize or preserve them, or I can give them to others to use. But more than likely they will just rot.
I just want my son’s death to not be without meaning. I also want the fruit of my grief to be known. If anyone wants or is able to do something with SPRL, please reach out to me. I would love to share this with the world, just don’t know the best way how.
