I’ve been working on a project lately. (CW: suicide, grief)

In early September, my brother in law Sam lost his battle with mental illness. It was… hard to watch happen, as he descended into a spiral of paranoid delusions, which led him to see hidden assailants that didn’t exist and physically assault people, both in public and in healthcare facilities and ultimately resulted in him taking his own life by jumping in front of a train, an option he specifically took because it meant he wouldn’t be found by his family.

It’s been hard to process my thoughts, especially because I’d only met him a few years ago when I met my wife, and he’d already had the edges of his fraying mental state then. His friends and family talk about him prior to his struggles, and it’s a person I don’t know and never met. The Sam I knew was an artist and musician who felt haunted by internal demons, whose creative works and whose devotion to helping communities and especially working in libraries and with people who most needed help reflected a person trying to do good, possibly because they were afraid of themselves.\

I’d talked with Sam a couple of times about painting miniatures, and he’d expressed interest. I never got a chance to teach him, but we’d talk about painting and he had been interested enough before things went severely downhill that I’d been eyeing a army to pick up for him as a starting point.

Near the end of September, a friend of mine sent me a starter pack of Blood Angels, part of a longstanding back and forth and a semi-joke gift he sent me intentionally to hit my buttons, because for decades I’ve made fun of Blood Angels, all the way back to the original Angels of Death codex where I played the cool Dark Angels and made fun of my friend who played the lame vampires. The gift came with the book Dante which I promised I’d read before deciding what to do with the army, and something clicked for me when I read it.

The Blood Angels are a faction of superhuman space marines, instilled with genetic code to push them well past human capability. They’re notable for their continuing struggle with being, well, vampires. To some extent they’re a meditation on the monster within, and they stave off their internal monster via art, creativity, and about as much community service as exists within the dark setting of Warhammer 40k. They all struggle with “the Flaw”, an affliction that both causes them to hunger for blood but also to see visions of an old battle, one in which their progenitor was killed and whose death haunts the entire group.

Some of them get lost in the visions, seeing enemies where there are none or mistaking friends or innocents for foes. They are often beyond saving, and are given special armor and treatment and transferred to a unit called the Death Company. They’re sent to places where their delusions can be turned against real enemies, where they can meet their end in honorable combat, which the Blood Angels value highly. They are remembered for who they were when they were lucid, and their loss of connection to reality is considered a reminder of how even the best of the Blood Angels are vulnerable.

It’s not… hard to make the connection. Sam was a musician, an artist, and a servant of the community. While when we’d talked about what he might play, Blood Angels weren’t on my list, but as a memorial they seemed apt.

I’ve got a handful of minis left for this project, most notably a Captain and a Death Company Dreadnought. The Captain, with some effort, has a look that’s roughly analogous to Sam’s curly hair, and I want to deck him out in ornate, gorgeous armor. The Dreadnought is a large mech, according to the lore a sort of walking casket for mortally wounded or even technically slain space marines. It’s fairly common in miniatures games to have a particular character represented in more than one way, reflecting different aspects of them or simply different points in time. I’m planning to represent Sam in both of these, golden armor and a halo in one, and a walking memorial to the dead in the other.

I’m sort of hoping it can be a way to keep a bit of Sam around for me. He can be there for the games I never got to teach him and play. My fondest wish when I eventually die is to be, somehow, made into dice so that I can continue to be a part of people’s games, their stories, joys, and memories with their friends, and that I can continue to play even past the end of my body’s limit.

I do a lot of processing my feelings through my creative work– miniatures and tabletop campaigns generally, and this is the third time I’ve done a project like this as a reflection of grief. I wish I’d gotten to get Sam into minis, and see the kinds of things he’d chosen and how he would have expressed himself through the medium. Maybe it would’ve been Warhammer, maybe Infinity or Battletech, maybe historical ship battles or Star Wars, I don’t know, but I would’ve liked to help him get started.

This is not the army I would’ve gotten him, no.

This is just a tribute.