I’ve been watching How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, and it has that very particular flavor of humor I can only describe as Catholic-adjacent existential mischief.
You know the tone.
Someone dies.
Someone lies.
Someone pours tea.
Someone says something so inappropriate you laugh and then immediately wonder if you’re going to hell.
The show floats along on grief, nostalgia, and the unsettling realization that nobody remembers the same childhood the same way. It’s a mystery, yes. But it is not the tidy, detective-board-with-red-string kind. It’s the messier kind. The kind where the clues are feelings. And the evidence is whatever version of the past we’ve decided we can live with.
Which brings me to the word of the week: mudlarker.
Historically, mudlarkers scraped riverbanks for discarded scraps of value. Broken pottery, bent coins, whatever history had coughed up overnight. But socially? Psychologically? Emotionally?
Oh, we are all mudlarkers.
We sift through conversations for meaning. We pocket other people’s stories to explain our own. We store away tiny artifacts. For example, the way she laughed, the way he left, the thing someone said at a kitchen table in 2008 that still lives rent-free in our nervous system.
We tell ourselves we’re remembering. But really, we’re curating.
Friendship, the show suggests, is less a scrapbook and more an archaeological dig. Layers of loyalty, resentment, projection, and selective amnesia. You don’t just know your friends. You excavate them. And sometimes, if we’re being honest, we polish the artifacts until they fit the story we prefer.
Writers do this professionally, of course. They take your heartbreak, file off the serial number, and win awards. But the truth is, most of us are doing a softer version of that all the time. We borrow each other’s stories to make sense of ourselves. We narrate. We revise. We mythologize.
And when someone dies, as happens inconveniently often in adult life, the mudlarking accelerates. Suddenly everyone’s memory becomes a thesis. People compete, gently but fiercely, over who knew her best, who understood her, who gets to define what her life meant.
It’s not malicious. It’s human.
Because stories are how we hold onto people when their bodies aren’t available anymore. Memory becomes the last place they exist, and we want to make that place coherent. Even if it never was.
That’s why the humor in this show works so well. It understands that grief isn’t solemn. It’s absurd. It’s awkward. It’s full of badly timed jokes and inappropriate thoughts and the sudden urge to talk about something trivial because the big feelings are too big to look at directly.
Laughter, in this context, isn’t disrespect. It’s survival. So yes, we’re all mudlarkers. Of friendships. Of childhoods.
Of the stories we tell about who we were before life complicated the plot.
The trick, I suppose, is not pretending our finds are pristine historical truth. They’re just fragments. Beautiful, biased, emotionally smudged fragments.
But maybe that’s enough.
After all, nobody remembers a life whole.
We remember it in pieces we can carry.
Categories: Culture, identity, mental health, Pop Culture, Psychology
psychologistmimi 
“Mudlarker” What a Timely Phrase Explaining what Happened
in a Funeral for a Southern Baptist Preacher Pastor where Several Other
Preachers gave Eulogies Sunday including Two Who Were Father-In-Laws
of the Deceased Pastor’s Children Keeping the Group All Tightly Knit Indeed
Anyway
Something
i Never heard
of Before as the
One Evangelist
in the Preacher Group
Tried to Explain How the Soft
Spoken Pastor Was often Judged
As Weak by the Congregation’s Gossip
By His Soft Spoken Loving Nature Not
Even Turning Any Money Tables over
And the Such as that Perhaps even
a better example than the J Dude Indeed
As after All Even He Indicated by His
Dear John Letter that Others who
Believed Would Do Greater Works
Than Him so hmm…
Like We Really
Needed to Hear
That In a Funeral Service
Hehe as i Digress HeaR somewhat too
Anyway the Evangelist was a “little man syndrome dude”
Of Course as i’ve Seen this Fire And Brimstone Hollering
Sentencing Folks
who are Different
From the Group Think
to Hell From the Pulpit
Many Instances in our
Locality Once Holding
the Guinness World
Record Yes for Most
Christian Churches
Per Capita ah Yes Yes
Holding Back Giggles
if they Try Their Fiery
Eyes on my Brown Shades
And Bright Changing Green Soul
Piercing to Blue Eyes Yet Hidden hehe
So Anyway the Evangelist Attempted to
Suggest that the Pastor Couldn’t Be a Real
Man Like Him Hollering Fire and Brimstone and the
Such Shaming those Who Shamed The Deceased Pastor
if they Happened
to be in the
Funeral
Audience
Going on to suggest
Correctly in Repentance
At the End Admitting the Deceased
Pastor Was Indeed a ‘Better Man’ Than
Him Albeit not a “Real Man” Like Him all
Small Yet Macho With A Silver Beard and
Such
As That
It Was kinda
Cringey as People
Were Looking around
at Each Other with WTF
Looks of What Did He Just do
Anyway Just another
Long Line of Case
Studies for the
Northern
Part of Our
County Tightly
Knit Yet Missing
a few cards of a full deck too
As the Dude Sitting Next to me
Assuming that No One Could possibly
Be a Democrat in the Entire Church
Ragged the Man
In Front of him
Getting close
to Another
Young Man
Making
Room for
Him to sit
In a Homophobic
Quip of ‘He Must
Be a Democrat’
Of course the other
Guy Just Laughed as
They Both Understood
They were Just Making fun of
People
Not Like Them
Protesting Dothly too Much
Obviously and Stuff Like that
The Human Condition is both
Warm
And
Paradoxically
Yes Hypocritically
Cold at the same time…
Yet of Course Neuroscience
Already Indicates Humans are
Not Particularly Rational Basically
Hallucinating Their Realities based
on the
Stories
They Create
Before ThiS WaY too
Of Course as a Participant
Anthropology Observer in
my Locality for Almost 66 years
This has always been abundantly
Clear to me True both on the Group
And
Individual
Level too
Dear Miriam
With SMiLes anyway
it took Literally Hours
for those Many Pastors
to Deliver their Eulogies
Yawn…
Just Yawn
Yet something
i’ve Been Waiting
to Muse About with
Just the right Muse
Finding
the Phrase
“Mudlarker”
Gifted by Dear
Miriam Today
Thanks
Indeed
With SMiLes…
i’ll Visit the Car Wash
Later to Wash off my Wheels
he
He…
Lots of
Muddy Roads
in the North of Our County
in
Deed…
i Kid You Not as Recently
as 1984 When i was first
Employed by the Navy as
a Federal Employee as the Indoctrinated
New Sailors Were Told NOT to Go to a Place
Called Jay in the North of Our County
After
Dark
IF They
Were African American
Hopefully by now this has changed
Sadly some places slower to be more
Fully
Human for all
As One May Wish
Hope And or Pray for
More
Continuing
Progress ThiS WaY…
Anyway at Least the Supreme Court
Proved it still has somewhat of a spine
Per 66 Percent of
Whole At Least
When it
Comes to
Wannbe
Dictator’s
And Tariff’s
These Days Today
Now Only if Half the
House and Senate
Will Grow a Pair too
As of Course they Insist
And Doth Protest They are
‘Real Men’ too…
Yep the
Circus
Remains
‘Eve’ Please
Pass the Popcorn
Let’s Watch CNN to
Celebrate at Least a Minute
Out of A Day
in the Life of
The Big Top Now…
Never Mind Turn it Off
Rather Watch Squirrels
And Birds Consume Sunflower
(We Always Provide Free as
my Wife is Watching ‘the View’)
Seeds Just on the Other Side
of Our HD 5 Foot High By Eight Foot Wide
Picture Window to Free Eternity for Real Now
(in ‘the Garden’)
The Rest of
Nature is
at
least
With
SMiLEs..:)
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