What will they say about you when you are dead and gone?
Face it.
Face the damned truth. No matter what golden palace encrusted, flying car
future you see waiting for you, someday, someway, you are shuffling off the
mortal coil. I'm not sure that it's a bad thing to have an
ending. All my favorite books have that great heady line at the end, the one weighed down with the thousands of words that rolled up behind them, the trip off into the sunset, horseback assured.
Moby Dick would have sucked if Ahab got the whale.
I've never been one to
let well enough alone. I enjoy the
big picture view of the world, the broad colorful strokes, the thick lines, the loud noises that come and go.
History is the story of a million lives done, grains of sand on a
beach. Can we remember things that came before us in anything other than vague
glimpses and
nibbles? History is
touchstones. I think about
Thermopylae a lot. Thermopylae is a story that appeals to my romantic tendancies.
Sacrifice,
treachery,
arrogance,
pride,
courage,
madness,
hubris and
contempt, Thermopylae had them all. But really, it is a story about the end of 300 lives. The curtain call for 300 souls, all at different pages in their respective
books. Do we think of each man, each face, each death, no matter how glorious or foolish or ugly or desperate?
No. We can't. We can't live the lives of others fully. My favorite
allegory is that of a
perfect map. A
1:1 map is exacting in detail, perfect in scope, and completely and utterly
useless.
The Devil is in the details.
Synopsis. I love the word synopsis.
The General View. I think of a little
Napoleon type on a grassy 18th century hill, watching blocks of
colorful men dash each other to pieces. The view on high, cool and calculating and hazy, free from the
emotion and
pain and
toil of dying men. When others remember you, they'll be up on that
hill.
I find, and I hope I'm not alone in this, that when I remember the
dead and gone, I come to the
touchstones in my own life when they where there. These weird scenes that become hard, like
pebbles, and really don't catalog the person as they were, but as the
emotion the made me feel. I tumble them over and over mentally, and they stay immutably the same, stamped
deep into some crevase in my head. I remember my Grandmother as a
voice, drifting down
shag carpeted stairs, coming to my ears as I watched big black and silver
angelfish swim in an
aquarium. I remember my Grandfather's face in a painter's respirator, wearing thick goggles and covered in fine
silver spray. Why? I have no idea. It's always my first thought of them. It worries me that I can't quickly see their faces, and that I usually dream about the day they each
died, and not of them, as people. It's that
snapback to the emotional mileposts of your life, how they affected you in your own selfish, middle of the
universe brained way, and not the dreams they had for
remembrance, thats what grates on my ego.
I'd hate the same
fate. Because you never know. My Gran dropped dead on the
threshold of her house, arm full of groceries. My dad is older now than she ever got to
be. It's that sort of
indifferent fate that you get a taste of when you pay attention to life for a while. You never do know.
So plan ahead, right? What would I have people
say of me? What are my dreams for the future, when they see me in their
mind's eye and fight back the haze that wraps memories after time, like
Christmas ornaments lost in the attic? What message would I beat into the
Rock of Ages with my still living hands?
I would say this of myself:
He was a
weary Titan that staggered under the too vast orb of his fate. He feared the
End of the World, and the petty animal hearts that men hid. He gladly died, works half finished and pages unturned, because he lived a
good life, in his
estimation, full of kept promises and lies he believed in. He loved many and hated many, and never did learn the
answers to all the questions he asked. He worried about
silly things, and did more harm than good on
occasion, was wrongheaded and right hearted, was stubborn and submitting, slept warmly and sometimes lonely. His
ego feared fading away, even more than the pain of death. He wondered about
you, and the lives that would come after his, and dreamed that he could make them
better, in some small way. He lived a life alike and different than many others, and he is
glad you remember him, how ever you
do.