I never thought that a Mii character would help ease the pains of losing a loved one. Never in my life would I have thought that I’d be grateful for that either. I would like to say that this is where I really got an appreciation for generational differences but that would be false. Some of my fondest memories are rooted in Nintendo moments. Laughing at the dog from Duck Hunt, sweating to Track-n-Field, or getting into real life fights because of Street Fighter. To see that my daughter is now processing the loss of her grandfather through Tomodachi Life isn’t as foreign as it may come off through this post.

I’ve lost a father; not my biological father, but my father through marriage, but my kids lost a grandfather, my wife and brother-in-law lost their father, and my mother-in-law lost the love of her life. I want to mourn him more deeply, I want to build my own Mii version of him, but I know I need to wait. This is the burden of a husband. We cry without tears. We cry through remembering when we laughed or struggled together, and we wipe those tears without ever letting them fall. Our comfort comes from knowing that our homes are sleeping when sleep needs to happen.

To my father-in-law I was the man who he didn’t want to meet because I represented the final stage of his parenting. Me taking on the role of son-in-law meant I would be starting from a foundation he built. More important, I would be expected to build on that. I would add children and maintain the security for his daughter he worked a lifetime to establish. I would be the one to put my pride down to ensure his daughter and his grandchildren would never go without the necessities of life. I would like to think that when death took him, I would be a comfort that confirmed his daughter and grandchildren would be provided for.

There is a different kind of bond a man feels towards his father-in-law. My perspective of a man who doesn’t respect the man who is the father of the woman they claim to love is skewed. My father-in-law was a good man who never beat, molested, neglected, or abused his daughter. He was her hero and in time he became one of mine too. I am more fortunate than men who marry and need to be stronger than me because a father broke a wife long before she’d meet the man who would be the safety a father should have been.

Because he was such a good man the children my wife and I brought into this world benefitted from a patient love that only a grandparent can give. They got away with things his daughter didn’t. All of the regrets he had for being a disciplinarian he made sure to correct through unapologetically loving his grandchildren. It’s hard to accept that he’s not going to be there to laugh when my wife complains about our kids getting away with what she wasn’t able to. That’s the role he had in life. Laughing at her frustration isn’t because he’s picking on her, but because he’s finally able to correct an action he felt hurt her.

I watch her mourn his loss, but I also see her smile when she thinks about him. I see how little things I do remind her of him. The traits that she didn’t know she was looking for. The traits neither of us knew would live on through a son-in-law. Tonight I put rice in my soup just because I didn’t want it to go to waste. My wife smiled and I asked what that was about – “Dad used to do that,” she said in a way that spoke to her choosing a smile over a tear.

I look at my son sitting quietly at the table looking at his phone a moment after the family chat gets a picture he posted of his grandfather. He’s grieving and spending time with him through old photos, maybe even some videos too. His sister is listening to a playlist of his favorite songs, and my wife is doing her best to keep it together while the one who never plays games is fully immersed into her Nintendo Switch. Her muttering trails off to sighs, then into laughter as she blurts out “Lolo!” She’s a full-grown college student, but as she waddles back to my wife, she’s a toddler.

“Look Mami, it’s Lolo! Doesn’t he look so good?”

Even from more than a room away I can see the tears in my wife’s eyes. “You made Lolo…”

She wasn’t grieving when she said that. This Mii was more than pixels but I cannot say what that means, I just know how that moment felt. My wife and daughters shared a moment that said, “we’re going to be alright. He’s not with us in life anymore, but that doesn’t mean that he’s not with us.” Eventually my son made it to them and the four laughed at Lolo the Mii and his adventuring through my daughter’s Tomodachi Life world. The next three days together had their moments of tears. My wife and I also had our in-bed conversations with tears, but when things got a little too hard we seemed to have a perfectly timed update from Lolo.

“Look, Lolo and Lola are sitting on a bench at the beach. Wait, Lolo’s getting up… ooookaaayy… he’s just walking around the bench and Lola’s getting annoyed.”

We’d break out into laughter because that seemed like something he’d do in real life. This game, this character came into our lives in the moment that he left it. A program, and collection of variables, and input statements that would interact with our answers to “if then” statements connected to our grief and imaginations in the right ways to help us process the emotions.

No one needed to feel like they didn’t say goodbye because all they had to do was start the game to talk to him again. Each of the kids eventually got the game and built their version of their grandfather, but my wife didn’t. She printed pictures and we put them on our coffee table. Moving pixels and printed ones all keep his face current in our memories. In time we will need them less, but we will never not look at them when we need him.

I would have never expected Nintendo to be the way that we as a family collectively said screw death’s timeline, we will always have our family memories. The pain of his loss is real, but this game gives us our own space to process the emotions and literally walk with him when we need to.