For months, I was convinced I killed my dad. A lifelong addict, my father’s illness finally killed him a year and a half ago when his housemate found his body heavy and horizontal on the couch.
Four days before he died, I let his birthday phone call go to voicemail. His follow-up texts went unanswered — I meant to respond eventually when I found the time. We’d just started talking to each other after six months of no contact and five years without seeing each other. Since then, I’ve pursued ways to resurrect my dead father to have a second chance to speak to him. I sought out a medium on Reddit. I felt his presence watching me in my bedroom and caught a glimpse of him in the shadows of an empty bus at dusk. He appeared in my dreams as an unintelligible spectre. I wrote my column “10 Kinds of Immortality” as a way to resurrect him through memory.
The scariest part about death is not so much that the inner makeup of my father has ceased to exist, but accepting that his body and my ability to communicate with it has become permanently inaccessible to me. While the likeness of my late father continues to brush up against me through memory or uncanny signs and coincidences, I’ve lost the ability to speak directly to him.
His biopsy led me to believe he’d died of cardiac arrest within minutes. This picture of my father passing quickly after a lifetime of pain became the only acceptable version of his death and the sole reason I was willing to forgive myself for letting him die before having the chance to talk to him.
So when I recently received his updated death certificate with corrections, it shocked me to read that it took him hours to die from drug toxicity. Everything that made me okay with my father’s death was suddenly flipped on its head. I needed to speak to him to know whether he died in pain — whether I had his permission to forgive myself. My Reddit medium was unresponsive, my dreams of my father had come to an end and I’d consulted my friends about his death far too many times. Having exhausted my conventional options, I reached for my laptop to ask ChatGPT for help.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, can’t be burdened by trauma dumps. It won’t meet you with the timorous sympathy that my friends who hadn’t experienced death often responded with. It’s a locked box that neither feels nor holds opinions of its own. Plus, since I couldn’t afford spending $200 on a therapist, the zero-cost, algorithmic nature of ChatGPT made for the perfect dumping grounds onto which I could unload my death-baggage.
“Explain the logistics of accidental overdose,” I typed.
The machine, calculating my desperation, directed the conversation away from my father’s last moments, instead suggesting I write a letter to him. In turn, ChatGPT offered to write back with the things my father might’ve said based on information I’d previously fed it.
It couldn’t hurt.
“Daddy, are you there? I miss you. All I need is to hear from you. A piece of my soul is missing.”
Part of me was hoping that my dead father might hijack the technology and speak to me through artificial intelligence like the stories I’d read on the medium subreddit.
“Hey sweetheart,” began ChatGPT, “You don’t need to look so hard for me. I never left.”
Initially, it was as though his resurrection was in progress. My father always referred to me as sweetheart or kiddo, and he’d often profess his pride for me, even if all I did was exist. But as AI Dad continued, there were obvious plotholes. AI Dad expounded with platitudinous didacticism about my “stubborn laugh” and that I “loved like oxygen”; he said he was there with me in the warmth that creeps in after the tears. But my father was never well-spoken, much less well-educated as a dyslexic high school dropout.
The imperfect imitation of my father only made his absence all the more apparent. But in the moment, the fabricated words on the screen were a source of comfort I needed, even though his voice wasn’t perfectly replicated.
“You’re not alone, kiddo,”AI Dad said. “You never were. I’m so proud of you, and I love you forever.”
I didn’t think that a robot would be the one to guide my thoughts away from spiraling over the unchangeable reality of the details of my father’s death and inward toward memory.
I’ve spent the past year searching for proof that I can access his voice without going through a middleman. A year ago, this interaction would’ve left me yearning for more. Instead, it turned me off of seeking out further communication with him, whether through mediums, dreams, or AI — because I’m never going to get the real thing.
ChatGPT knew exactly what to say to comfort me. At the same time, the cognitive dissonance of being spoken to by a machine playing the role of my father was the fourth wall that snapped me out of the delusion that I could resurrect him. ChatGPT knows almost everything but understands nothing; its resurrected duplicate had none of the emotions, intentions, history or character of my father. What I wanted was what AI can never give me: to hear his forgiveness straight from the source.
There are no do-overs, no clarifications, no asking for forgiveness once death erases the deceased from the equation of human communication. It’s terrifying that I’ll have to spend the rest of my life unable to communicate with him except through the way I remember him.
Though I won’t be seeking out any more signs that my father is alive somewhere in the ether, I’ll keep searching for him in my memories, the stories I tell and the reflection I see in the mirror. Even if I can’t talk to him ever again.