A Canadian blogger who died of cancer at 41 has posted an elegant, thoughtful, final post about his passing.
I suppose we all want to get the last word in about ourselves, but I'm not sure how much it matters. I've wandered many a European cathedral- and even an ancient Greek cemetery- where those who could put up all sorts of monuments to themselves and their lives. But the fact is, once the last person who remembers us dies, we're dead. No one remembers us. Absent some sort of public notoriety, we cease to exist. I had a cherished, elderly, friend in college- a poet, who wrote a poem about visiting her family plot and realizing there was no one left alive who could remember her as a child. In my family graveyard now there's headstone after headstone marking the rest of relatives no one remembers except by name, and then only barely. More ancient ancestors lie unmarked, the victims of stone that eroded away and a fire in the 1890s that reduced the church records to ash.
You never know. President John Tyler was born in 1790. His last surviving child died in 1948. I used to wonder what Nobel winner Saul Bellow had in mind when he fathered a child at 84. Was it something he really cared about, or just a trophy, perhaps guaranteeing a Tyler-like headline nearly a century ahead of publication?
At 55, depending on which genes prevail, I've got a few years left before I fall over dead from a heart attack, or 25-30 years, at the end of which I'll slowly lose my wits and forget how to wake up one day.
At this stage, I think I'd prefer the former, if only because it'd be less inconvenient for others around me and because it looks like health care in the US will just get shabbier and grudging and more mean-spirited toward the elderly as the century goes on.
But, what the hey. I don't get a vote. One day you just don't show up and it's something you either get some notice of or you don't. Either way, once you've fallen off your perch, as an English friend of mine put it, you've got no skin in the game. You probably won't get the funeral you told everyone you wanted. You'll get the funeral they want. You may get some preacher who never knew you and/or a bunch of eulogists desperate to tidy up how you're perceived as a relative/friend of theirs. I saw a lot of that in the plague years of the 1980s and '90s, when friends and I sat in mourning and wonderment at the parallel universe our loved ones were described as having occupied by their loved ones.
So maybe it's a nice technological option to be able to write your own obituary online. If, of course, you play your cards right so nobody can get online, use your password, and hit "delete."
But in a more perfect, and gracious, world, I hope we can all be like Derek the British Columbia Blogger who was able to leave some thoughts behind about his life, his wife and his kids, and how much he loved them all.
We should all be so lucky- with someone to tell and a means of telling it. And people who'll treasure and preserve it.
I suppose we all want to get the last word in about ourselves, but I'm not sure how much it matters. I've wandered many a European cathedral- and even an ancient Greek cemetery- where those who could put up all sorts of monuments to themselves and their lives. But the fact is, once the last person who remembers us dies, we're dead. No one remembers us. Absent some sort of public notoriety, we cease to exist. I had a cherished, elderly, friend in college- a poet, who wrote a poem about visiting her family plot and realizing there was no one left alive who could remember her as a child. In my family graveyard now there's headstone after headstone marking the rest of relatives no one remembers except by name, and then only barely. More ancient ancestors lie unmarked, the victims of stone that eroded away and a fire in the 1890s that reduced the church records to ash.
You never know. President John Tyler was born in 1790. His last surviving child died in 1948. I used to wonder what Nobel winner Saul Bellow had in mind when he fathered a child at 84. Was it something he really cared about, or just a trophy, perhaps guaranteeing a Tyler-like headline nearly a century ahead of publication?
At 55, depending on which genes prevail, I've got a few years left before I fall over dead from a heart attack, or 25-30 years, at the end of which I'll slowly lose my wits and forget how to wake up one day.
At this stage, I think I'd prefer the former, if only because it'd be less inconvenient for others around me and because it looks like health care in the US will just get shabbier and grudging and more mean-spirited toward the elderly as the century goes on.
But, what the hey. I don't get a vote. One day you just don't show up and it's something you either get some notice of or you don't. Either way, once you've fallen off your perch, as an English friend of mine put it, you've got no skin in the game. You probably won't get the funeral you told everyone you wanted. You'll get the funeral they want. You may get some preacher who never knew you and/or a bunch of eulogists desperate to tidy up how you're perceived as a relative/friend of theirs. I saw a lot of that in the plague years of the 1980s and '90s, when friends and I sat in mourning and wonderment at the parallel universe our loved ones were described as having occupied by their loved ones.
So maybe it's a nice technological option to be able to write your own obituary online. If, of course, you play your cards right so nobody can get online, use your password, and hit "delete."
But in a more perfect, and gracious, world, I hope we can all be like Derek the British Columbia Blogger who was able to leave some thoughts behind about his life, his wife and his kids, and how much he loved them all.
We should all be so lucky- with someone to tell and a means of telling it. And people who'll treasure and preserve it.
saddest and most eloquent thing I have read in some time...
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