I woke up on the first day of the 2020 before 5am. While I am sure I dream just as often as anyone else, I almost never remember my dreams. When I do remember them, they are uniformly unsettling and filled with the garbage bin of my daily experiences. I’m never happy to recall one of my dreams. Starting off the year this way, even with less distressing subject matter in the dream, wouldn’t have been something I took as a positive sign. Unfortunately for me, it was a very distressing dream.

In this dream, my mother had called me to tell me that my father was dying and would be dead before the end of the year.

I’m not a superstituous person by nature, and I don’t want to give the impression that this was a prophetic dream. My father had been sick for a while with an undiagnosed illness, and I recall thinking he looked very sick when I had seen him a few months previously. At the end of December 2019, he was diagnosed with meningitis and a break in his spine.

I assumed this dream was residual stress from that, my job, and my very rocky home life. It almost certainly was. I’m an anxious and mentally unwell person.


Never the less, my father was dead before the end of the year. I never got to see him alive again.

Why do they call it Invincible if you can see it?

We were early adopters of the pandemic (haha).

Like so many people at that time, I had gotten back into MMOs after a hiatus of several years. MMOs were a standin for in-person interaction for years prior to the pandemic, and the world suddenly masking and demanding you stay away from people did nothing to help beat the allegations. You couldn’t leave the house if you weren’t an essential worker. Jobs hadn’t figured out how to be remote yet, so there wasn’t a lot that was immediately being asked of people. What better way to pass time than to spend it riding around through Azeroth or Eorzea? A friend had convinced me to come back to WoW, and try out a guild that would push into mythic content casually until the next patch cycle each time, but not take it too seriously (spoiler: my time in that guild and subsequent experience caused further mental health deterioration, but that’s not important).

I had been working from home for a while, and I hadn’t yet learned and developed mechanics to cope with the situation. My stress was mounting as my work was asking me to revive and implement a proposal they had somewhat embarassed me over and roundly rejected at the end of 2019. My family’s and my mental health was deteriorating even further, and I wasn’t in place where I was sleeping much. I go through periods where I can’t sleep more than 2-3 hours a night for a week or two before crashing out and my body resets and I sleep like 13 hours. I was in the middle of one of these cycles, when I decided I would use these periods of insomnia to casually run old raids in World of Warcraft to try and get the mounts that evaded me when the content was current.

It was about 4 in the morning, and I woke up feeling anxious. I decided I would run Icecrown Citadel – a famous WoW raid feature Arthas Menethil – in an attempt to get Arthas’s signature mount, Invincible. It’s a spooky armored horse with bat wings. What’s not to love? It eluded me when the content was current – I couldn’t win the roll to save my life – but it only took a few minutes to blast through the whole thing in a weekly attempt the way scaling and leveling had worked out in the game. I had cleared all of the wings and was about to ascend to the spire when I got a text from my mother that just said, “I know it’s early. Can you call me?”

An important thing to know is that my mother hates the phone. She would never ask me to call her if it wasn’t something that she absolutely couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me in text. There aren’t too many of those things that would then ALSO be something she would want to call me about.

I called her almost immediately and learned my father was dying from stage 4 cancer before 5 in the morning. I lived 3000 miles away, a pandemic had just started, and my father was dying of cancer.

I went back to my computer, sat down, killed Arthas, watched as I looted Invincible and the achievement popped up, and knew I would never be able to ride it or enjoy it ever again.

It never even made it to my list of random mounts.

…but at least Sanguine Halls is an all-time banger

Shadowlands is a much hated WoW expansion for a lot of good reasons. The Anima gating, soulbinds, covenants, Korthia, Sylvanus, scary nipples, Torghast, the Maw – all great reasons to illustrate the issues with the expansion. It took a science fantasy approach to the material that was jarring against a lot of existing story, but I didn’t care because I love Planescape and Spelljammer. Zerith Mortis would have been at home in either, same with Ardenweald and Bastion. Revendreth was Ravenloft, whic h is also fine.

It was also an expansion focused on death and what it means in Azeroth.

I was 3000 miles away, and failing at my job and at being a good father and husband. I didn’t have anyone I could talk to about my father dying. When Shadowlands released, I knew the end was close my father, and I still hadn’t gotten to see him. I didn’t have any hope that I would. The world wasn’t in favor of it. Two weeks after the launch, he died. I did, in fact, not get to see him alive ever again.

I immersed myself in Shadowlands the way I hadn’t done maybe ever. I read every piece of dialogue. I did every quest. I did every covenant. I even had multiple characters.

It wasn’t because I loved the expansion. I had the same complaints that everyone else did. Hell, I went and played FFXIV and did my first and only UItimate during that period. But I didn’t quit the way a lot of other people did. I was sneaking and playing the game where people couldn’t see me do it. It wasn’t like I enjoyed the game to the point of doing that. I wouldn’t say I liked the game at that time, nor would I say I disliked the game. I don’t think I was really capable of feeling any way about the game during that time period, honestly. Despite that, I found myself needing to play Shadowlands.

I would find myself drawn to specific places in Ardenweald or Bastion where I would use inky black potion and just stare at my screen for probably far too long. I would go to zones and just listen to the music and look at the people and the objects in the world. I didn’t care that the game play loops were objectively bad and exploitative. I didn’t care that the game didn’t respect me or my time. I only cared that I could walk amongst the dead and experience what they believed were happening, and were asking me for contextualize for myself. I won’t pretend that the writing was secretly good, or that the story was nuanced and people had to just give it a chance. But I also don’t care about any of that.

I care that I can think of a specific pool and remember staring at it and thinking how I would live with myself if I never got to see my father again. I care I can remember doing a quest in Bastion and wondering how it was fair my kids would miss out knowing their grandfather when he was such a big part of the lives of my nephews. This sounds like I am tying these bad memories to a bad expansion and that I should hate it. Which is true, except that it isn’t.

For whatever reason, experiencing Shadowlands was what allowed me to keep going day after day. The constant bombardment of death and loss made me think about it and confront it constantly. I couldn’t play the game and not think about it, but at the same time I wasn’t being asked to think about it or being asked what I thought about it. I could just…experience it and decide what I wanted to think about. I mostly thought about loss and how we lose things in the way we experience that loss. I thought about forgiveness, and what it means in the face of loss and grief. I also thought about the things you discover along the way that you don’t even know you knew until you do.

The Other Side of Grief

I tried to continue that sense of connection and inner growth that I experienced in Shadowlands over the new few years. I am sure it comes as no surprise to learn that my interaction and use of the game rapidly went from healthy to unhealthy as I gradually moved away from the experiences that were helping me. I tried to rely on skill and content to keep me in the game and having a great time. The truth though is I’m not very good, and my friends are all better than me. I rapidly felt like a burden as I came to understand just how not really good at games I was, and how wrong my sense of identity was to think of myself in this fashion. My friends are great people and wouldn’t say as much to me, but I really don’t like be the cause of failure or the reason that people are disappointed.

In that context, it’s no wonder that each year and expansion felt like more and more of something that ate away at me. While all of that is true, none of this is really the underlying reason why I was so disappointed.

The simple truth is that my father has been dead for almost six years, and my grief and interaction with it has changed.

What the game offers doesn’t resonate with me the same way, and frankly it’s a miracle and a blessing that the game lined up for me the way it did with the most reviled expansion of all time. I can’t interact with the game in the same ways that I once did, and whenever I search for a connection I’m met with a gap that I can’t get past. That’s not anyone’s fault. It’s not even bad. It is, however, something I could choose to accept or not. I chose to accept it for a long time.

But when you’re ready to move on, you’re ready to move on. You can also choose to accept that or not.

As before, I accept it.

I spent 30 minutes before sitting down to finish this post that has been years in the writing talking to my oldest son about my father. My youngest doesn’t remember my father, and was upset that my oldest was upset from seeing a photo of my father. I talked to my son at length about grief, and how special and personal it is to everyone that’s experiencing it. We talked about his younger brother and how he processes things, and how my oldest felt and managed that. In doing so, of course I remember how I feel about it all and all of the things I mentioned before are still true.

But I have words to talk about it now. I didn’t have that before. That makes a big difference.