THOUGHTS ON THE EVENING OF

'What MS Takes In Silence'
Written & Narrated by Duff Archie

​If you read the last post, you might think you know Tim Archie. The humor. Root Man. Exit stage left. We Crack Ourselves Up. The man who met every stage of PPMS with a walking stick, a one-liner, and a whole lot of patience. This is what he didn’t show us…

For years, it’s been a running Archie family joke that while we somehow always had access to Netflix, Hulu, and half a dozen other streaming services, we could never recover the passwords because they were all tied to my dad’s old mac.com email address from the dawn of the internet. The account had been locked since he died. We’d long given up on ever getting back into it.

Then Netflix cracked down on password sharing, and after riding the family account for over a decade, I got kicked off. The screen went black: Who’s watching? followed by You are not part of this household.

I called Ben to help a brother out, literally. My younger brother had, at some point, quietly appointed himself the family’s IT department, managing Disney+ logins and streaming passwords with the competence of someone who genuinely enjoyed holding the keys to the castle.

I tried calling Mom to try something through her Xfinity account. Ben called back. We merged.
“You’ll thank me later,” he said.

He’d called our uncle, Andrew, my mom’s younger brother, who ended up with Dad’s old iPhone after he passed. The phone was still connected to the same Apple account. Twenty minutes and some forgot-your-passcode miracle later, we were in.

It was the evening of March 18, 2025. His death anniversary. Seven years to the night.

And here we were, my mom, my brother, and me, on a merged call, staring at our late father’s iCloud account because I couldn’t believe the audacity of Netflix to call me a “household member.”

The recent files were clinical: temperature readings, O2 levels, and handwritten healthcare notes. That is what end-of-life care actually looks like inside someone’s personal account.

Somewhere in there, there’s probably an essay in that alone.


THE OTHER TIM
But go back further, years further, and the other Tim appears.

Jokes. One-liners, knock-knock jokes, a whole section of cow Q&A jokes. The man was the king of “Dad Jokes.”
“Where do you find a dog with no legs? Right where you left him.”

There was Scripture, Psalms, quotes from Emerson, Thomas Paine, and Shakespeare. A note titled “MS.” A packing list. A note with my name on it from when I left for college. A note with Ben’s name on it with an itemized list of his schoolwork. Clipped articles and family email chains going back to the early 2000s, before the word “meme” existed in common internet slang.

​Hidden among all of it was a note titled Thoughts on the Evening of.
It had two updates.

The first, dated February 17, 2012, was titled “A Realization.”

Those around me all have their lives, interesting and different. I am interested in what they do and how they did it.
My days are the same. I am alone, all day every day. My dreams, ideas and goals are kept to myself. Silent.
I know this will always be the same. How can I change it? What should I do differently?
If I do anything with anyone, it is time paid for or time someone would rather be doing something else.
It is not time shared together. I am tired of being alone.

Eleven days later, he must’ve opened the same note and added a second entry for context.

I found out tonight that J, D&B are going to Scotland in addition to England.
[Remaining text is clipped in the supplied source.]

He never showed it to anyone. Not my mom. Not Ben. Not me.
I’m not going to sugarcoat how hard it was for the three of us to sit there silently on the phone together as we read such a personal thought. But two things can be independently true.

The dad I wrote about in the last essay, the one who named Root Man, who deflected a stranger’s accusations on King Street with a one-liner, who looked at his doctor and said “exit stage left” to a terminal prognosis, who let a group of veterans manhandle him down a granite slope and filed the “last great mission” framing as quality material, and the one who wrote “I am tired of being alone” were the same person.

My mom had a global partner meeting in Cambridge, England, that July. The plan was for Ben and me to tag along, and afterward we’d head up to Scotland for a few extra days.

This was a bucket-list trip.

As you may remember from The Ring, the Archies have heritage in the Highlands, and it just so happened to be the trip Dad had talked about in one way or another for years, top of his list… And he would be home.

He wrote what he felt and then he went back to cracking jokes.
Because that’s what he did.
That’s what we did.
We crack ourselves up.


THE UNLIVED LIFE
A former professor of mine, turned mentor, turned friend, who lives with MS herself, put a name to this recently:
The Unlived Life: the grief for the parts of yourself that are lost

She’s a sailor who can no longer sail, a skater who can no longer skate. Those things were how she approached life and how she defined herself. More things have been lost than she could possibly gain back. She told me she protects the people closest to her from some of it. And they’re okay with that, either unconsciously or consciously.

When I told her about the iPhone note, she said the quiet part out loud:
“He kept it from you on purpose. You were his kid. He was protecting you from the weight of it.”

Of course he did. You want to protect those closest to you from the “stupid” disease. The person with the condition is helping manage everyone else’s experience of it. March was MS Awareness Month, and the National MS Society’s campaign this year was “MS Unseen.” They mean invisible symptoms. Fatigue, pain, cognitive changes, depression.

And they’re right.
But my dad’s note is a different kind of unseen.


​THE INVISIBLE PERSON
It’s what happens over years underneath all of it.
The hobbies that go quiet.
The family trips that leave without you.

The gap between the Tim everyone saw, the jokes, the resilience, the family motto, and the Tim who wrote that note is the entire thesis of Expedition MS.

Identity erosion happens invisibly. Most support systems miss it entirely.
I found my dad’s note because I needed a Netflix password. ∎

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​I’m building Expedition MS, a nonprofit that puts people with MS on the water through sailing expeditions and tells their stories through professional documentary filmmaking, so fewer people have to write notes like that to themselves. More on that soon.

This is the second in a series. The first, 'You Can’t Be Sad in a Mexican Restaurant', tells the progression of my dad’s twenty years with PPMS. If this story found you, we’d love to hear your story as well.

Visit us online: www.expeditionms.org