What Do We Owe Our Dead?
March 25, 2026
In Elizabeth Finch, Julian Barnes’s character falls platonically in love with one of his teachers, a woman whose clarity and intelligence become his lodestar. After her death, he vows to overcome his habitual procrastination and research a historical figure he suspects she wanted him to write about. “To please the dead,” he tells himself. “Naturally, we honour the dead, but in honouring them, we somehow make them even more dead. But to please the dead, this brings them to life again.”
The distinction rang true. Periodically, usually at times tinged with self-disgust, I think of my mom and worry that I am not living up to the standards she taught me. Not honoring her sleek, tidy vision for me. At other times, though, a happy thought flashes: how delighted she would be by this dog, I think, or by the hellebores blooming in the snow, or by some example of love, humor, care, tenderness, connection. Those moments are about sharing, not guilt or valiant effort. And they do bring her to life for me.
Those loved and lost live between worlds, kept alive because we remember them, resurrected every time we let them influence us again. “The dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them,” wrote George Eliot. We owe them this place in our psyche, this lingering in the world. When my best friend asked what she could do after my mom died, I blurted, “Talk about her with me.” I did not want to let the ghostly vapors dissolve, vanishing in the mist like Hamlet’s father. And I knew that every year, there would be fewer people alive who had known her, and my own memories would grow thinner, fainter, uncertain.
What else do we owe the dead? My husband teases me regularly about the marble monument he expects me to erect, with a videotape playing something sarcastic on a loop…. If he really wants it, he will have to outlive me. But if he does die first, I know he wants a proper burial, though my own instinct would be to give both our bodies to a med school. I will grudgingly honor his wishes, mainly for fear of the haunting. And I will be one of those widows who keep up a running conversation with the dear departed, because after all these decades, I am not sure how to live not in dialogue with him.
For the time being, though, I am on a Julian Barnes kick, digging through his backlist after loving Departure(s). In the autobiographical Nothing to Be Frightened Of, he argues with his brother, a philosopher, after their mother’s death: “He pointed out that there are the wants of the dead, i.e. things which people now dead once wanted; and there are hypothetical wants, i.e. things which people would or might have wanted. ‘What Mother would have wanted’ was a combination of the two: a hypothetical want of the dead, and therefore doubly questionable. ‘We can only do what we want,’ he explained; to indulge the maternal hypothetical was as irrational as if he were now to pay attention to his own past desires.”
Barnes countered that they “should try to do what she would have wanted, a) because we have to do something, and that something (unless we simply left her body to rot in the back garden) involves choices; and b) because we hope that when we die, others will do what we in our turn would have wanted.”
B) seems a common response, and it leaves me wondering how much of our obedience to the dead is that selfish. Cold though Barnes’s brother sounds, I have to agree with him: second-guessing the wishes of the dead is a fool’s errand. They can no longer be hurt or helped, made to suffer or relieved. They have passed, meaning they are past all this. “Funerals are for the living,” someone’s aunt invariably murmurs as the arrangements are made. Yet we still feel obliged to the dead, as though a hand will reach out from the casket and take a firm, chilly hold of our forearm.
Maybe we are scared for good reason. Maybe we can harm the dead, simply by harming the interests they had when they were alive. If they cherished their fine reputation and it is slandered after their death, that interest has been thwarted. Death does not extinguish everything a person cared about and built. Nor does it erase the relationships they had with the living.
Aristotle added a motive: how we treat the dead reflects our own character. Honoring them is an exercise in virtue, deepening our gratitude, piety, loyalty, and respect. We do it for ourselves, because failing to give honor would be morally dubious, a sign of weak character. In this philosophy, those we lose become occasions for virtue, with cellophane bouquets dropped faithfully onto the granite every year.
But where does it stop? Do we have duties to all the dead, or can we pick and choose? And what about the ways we invoke them without ever having received their permission?
Jim Acosta, once a CNN White House correspondent, interviewed the AI avatar of Joaquin Oliver, who was one of the seventeen people murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018. “I was taken from this world too soon due to gun violence,” the bot told him. “It’s important to talk about these issues so we can create a safer future for everyone.”
Media critic Parker Molloy was appalled. “This wasn’t journalism,” she wrote. “Whether it was his intention or not, this was Jim Acosta turning a murdered child into content.”
Asked about solutions to gun violence, the Joaquin bot said, “I believe in a mix of stronger gun control laws, mental health support, and community engagement. We need to create safe spaces for conversations and connections, making sure everyone feels seen and heard.”
“That’s not a teenager talking,” Molloy snapped. “That’s not even a human being. It’s the kind of sanitized corporate-speak you’d get if you asked Chat GPT to write a mission statement for a nonprofit.
“The real Joaquin Oliver was 17,” she continued. “He wrote poetry.”
Acosta ended by saying “God bless you”—to the bot. “As if there were something sacred happening instead of something grotesque,” said Molloy.
After the “interview,” which was mainly about Star Wars and basketball, Acosta told Joaquin’s father, “I feel like for the first time I’ve really gotten to know him…. It’s a reallyg beautiful thing.”
To Molloy, it was “algorithmic word soup dressed up as a dead kid.” Real journalism, she concluded, “would mean examining why we’re suddenly cool with making the dead into chatbots. Real journalism would ask hard questions about consent (the dead can’t give it), about exploitation (this whole thing reeks of it), about what happens when we normalize conversations with digital ghosts.”
Which we will be doing a whole lot more of, simply because we can.
Julian Barnes’s B) rationale took what is called the contractarian approach: we honor the dead because we want to be honored ourselves. After a lifetime of attending closely to our own behavior, do we want a bot to suddenly act as us and spout whatever it makes of the words we leave behind? Such projects can work much more plausibly than the Joaquin bot; at seventeen, you have not yet left much for AI to work with. Still, it will only be recombining and guessing. Those of us with enterprising kids or spouses might want to add a codicil to our wills.
Many non-Western traditions keep their dead alive without tech; the dead remain part of the ongoing community. Ancestors are venerated, and I suspect they are also pleased, by all the sweets and flowers, reenactings and memorabilia. In many parts of Africa, the dead are seen as “living-dead,” owed respect not because they are dead but because they remain part of the community. Are the stories told over and over again better at keeping someone alive than the dialogue an algorithm can produce? Yes, if those stories are told with love. The details might be fuzzy, but accuracy is irrelevant. What matters is how that person touched other lives, and those who were changed do not need a mechanical resurrection to remind them.
