When I’m Gone

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”  (Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451)

The ancient Egyptians thought that to speak the name of the dead was to bring them to life again in the after-world.  So for them, and it would seem the majority of humankind, creating a lasting memory in this life was rather essential to your continued spiritual existence in the next.

Certainly we leave behind us, most of us, memories in the hearts of those whom we have come in contact with.  But such personal memory can only survive for a few generations at best.  Eternal memory is something else, an attainment much more elusive and rare.

There seem to be really only two ways of doing this; by Creation or Destruction, i.e., Love or Hate

We have the evidence that it is accomplishable; philosophers, writers, dictators, artists, assassins; all the assorted peopling of history and humanities.  But really, how many of us can reasonably aspire to such?

And ought we to? The remembrance we aspire too may not be what we get. After all, we know memory changes with the telling and retelling of the tale until the persona of the after-life may be unrecognizable compared to the living and breathing being that once existed.  So even a good life can be vilified in death, and a bad one made noble. Such a life after death then, if it does exist, may not be anything like what we imagine it.

It seems to me, living now in this world, that all we can strive to do is honor the work of our hands by giving the best possible effort we have, share in some form the thoughts we acquire and create as a responsibility to those that follow, and to never fail to passionately and verbally acknowledge the love we bear to the few in our lives accepting of it.  These are the gifts we can give, that will have lasting relevance.

The alternative is to kill and destroy as much and as violently as possible, and/or to consume every possible asset of nature and man as widely and flamboyantly as we can. i.e., “Live wild, die young, leave a pretty corpse” (Too late for that now, anyway)

By continuously encouraging the growth and happiness of those we come in contact with, even in the everyday interactions with strangers, perhaps we may pique, albeit a short, but hopefully a fond, memory. That, for me would seem enough.  With that accomplishment I would be content to accept a nameless eternity . . .