Will anyone remember you?
How will they remember you?
Pages By The Sea is a place where we affirm life. Short stories and essays explore how we can live a fuller and richer life.
You and me, by the sea, drink in hand, toes in sand.
Contemplating life and death and the purpose and meaning of it all.
Thank you for taking a moment to read this. It is very much appreciated.
The news came on a Saturday night.
Shock, surprise, sadness.
The funeral arrangements began. It would be next Friday. That way everyone has a chance to make their own arrangements and prepare to travel.
Calling hours and visitation Friday afternoon and evening.
Funeral service and cemetery burial Saturday at noon.
One week after the news it was all over. The coffin lowered into the ground, roses thrown on top, a few words from the minister, a moment of silence. Then everyone went back to the house for a luncheon.
Conversations about how sad it was, how he was still young, the cancer spread so fast, how will his wife cope with it all?
Then the talk turned back to normal. How’s work? Big presentation next week, I’m so stressed. How’s the kids and what are they up to? Studying for the SAT’s, trying to get into a good college, it’s so much work. The travel getting here was so bad, traffic is terrible, and don’t even get me started on the airports.
Keep in touch, we’ll be thinking of you, so sorry for your loss, let’s get together.
And then the house was empty.
Everyone was back home by Saturday night. They did their regular Sunday routine. Monday morning was back to real life. School, work, stress and busyness.
The funeral forgotten, the deceased forgotten, as people returned to their lives and returned to thinking about themselves.
“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian writer, is my favorite book. The first chapter is a devastating commentary on human nature.
Ivan’s colleagues from the firm he works at read about his death in the morning newspaper. He was liked and they knew he had been sick as he was gone from the office for weeks and his post had been kept open for his return.
Yet, upon hearing of Ivan’s death, each coworkers’ first thought was how Ivan’s death might help them with a promotion or advancement in their career.
The conversation which followed went along these lines: “I kept meaning to visit him but…”, “we’ll have to go to the funeral but they live so terribly far away”, and so on. Every mention was of either an inconvenience to themselves or a thought of their own advancement.
But every one of his fellow workers, upon considering Ivan’s death, all had a feeling of joy that it was he, Ivan, who was dead and not them.
“You see, he’s dead, and I’m not,” each of them thought or felt.
And each person, close friend or acquaintance, thought they would now have to fulfill the very boring obligations of decency and go to the funeral service and go to the widow on a visit of condolence.
Tolstoy here is making a statement on mankind. We are inherently self-centered. Even when someone dies, we think of the inconvenience and interruption to our lives. And we are simply glad it was he who died and not I.
We’ll all be forgotten by Monday morning.
Not our family, they will remember and miss us. They will honor us.
But all the others. Life goes on, busyness returns and they are absorbed in their own life.
That’s natural, isn’t it? That’s normal. What good does it do to continually think about the dead?
Life must go on. And so it does.
We must live and so we do.
The question really is HOW will someone think of you after you are gone?
Is that something that matters to us?
Many people want to leave a legacy, tell a story of who they were, so they are remembered in some way. Have a real gravestone.
Other people couldn't care less. They lived and they died and they are gone. What does it matter?
These people do not want ceremony, no gravestone to mark their time on this earth.
When family or friends bring up the name of the person who has died, what do they say? How do they say it? What do they think in private?
Is this something that matters to us?
Or rather, when we’re gone we’re gone, so it doesn’t matter.
Does being remembered, in any certain way, matter to us?
Does that decision determine how we live? How we walk through this life? How we treat people?
When Ivan Ilyich finally died, suffering painfully in his home, his family was relieved. They felt he had tortured them with his moans of pain.
He was dying and they were inconvenienced by it.
Until next time… live a life of kindness.
Keith Bakker