The Tasks of the Living and the Dead

We delegate roles in life.
I imagine the delegation of roles is even older than the history of the human race. Every social species delegates functions to its individuals. No one can do everything. Perhaps that's why the delegation of roles in society seems natural to most people: men should do certain kinds of work and assume certain functions, and women should do other kinds of work and assume other kinds of functions. Social change is largely about the delegation of roles to different categories of people in society, or recategorizing people.
Some of this delegation of roles is self-evident in our complex world: we have health-care professionals, legal professionals, engineers, politicians, journalists. But a lot of role-assignment is symbolic, phenomena that social psychologists study such as who asserts leadership in a group, who's disruptive, who's the clown, who eases tensions.
There's also role-assignment in the family, and when someone in the family dies, what happens to the role that person was playing?
I know that Asher's sisters and brother are struggling with that issue, and, I am too. Perhaps each of us will gradually take on some of Asher's roles, though no one will ever play them as fully as he did. The family is missing that component now.
I am an only child, and I always thought my children were fortunate in having siblings because it allowed them to specialize more than I could. I had to be everything for my parents, or as much as I could be, and to a degree the obligations I felt - not always articulated, of course - were contradictory, and the inability to negotiate the contradictions disabled me. My parents, especially my mother, wanted me to be a great variety of things, things that I couldn't possibly be at the same time, and the work of trying to be the good son and please them kept me from doing the work of figuring out what I wanted to be.
Perhaps that's why I conceived my goal as a parent as being a facilitator, helping my children be themselves rather than imposing an idea on them of what they ought to be. Regardless of my attitude as a father, in our family, each of the four children naturally had more freedom to be herself or himself, because there were others doing different things in different ways.
Asher was openly rebellious, perhaps his siblings' delegate in rebellion. He always challenged our authority as parents and adults, so the others didn't have to. Asher was also the restless, creative one, the artist, the initiator of projects, so maybe his siblings, who are also talented in the creative arts, conceded that role to him. Now we'll all have to be more creative and enterprising, because we don't have Asher to do it for us.
Recently I started taking a ceramics class. Perhaps Asher's restless spirit pushed me into it. Oddly, seeing how much I enjoy working with clay, I never even considered doing it, even though our two daughters took ceramics and both of them are good at it. My mother also did ceramics on and off for thirty or forty years. It began when I was a kid. She took me to a ceramics class at Greenwich House, a wonderful community center in Greenwich Village, where we lived. To walk back home after leaving me there and then come and pick me up again would have been onerous, so she was persuaded to enroll in an adult ceramics class to pass the time while I was with the kids. I gave it up when I was about twelve: I was the only boy left in the class. But she kept at it, and we have, use, and cherish a lot of her free-spirited, hand-built work.
My mother never worked on the wheel, but I decided to start on it right away. I love it. I wouldn't mind spending all day at it. So it appears that the delegation goes both ways: we assigned roles to Asher - and they weren't always easy for him, and he suffered. Now he and my mother, who had a lot in common, are assigning a role to me: learn to use the potter's wheel. As a tribute to your son, be more like him!