LIVING A LIFE THAT MATTERS: Being Remembered and Being Missed

Prompted by the eloquent comment by Keanu Reeves that what he knew about what happens after you die is that the people who loved you will miss you, I thought more deeply about the idea of being missed and the related concept of being remembered.

The foreboding and depressing idea that once gone we will be forgotten is captured in a powerful metaphor by Saxon White: “Take a bucket and fill it with water,/ Put your hand in it up to the wrist, / Pull it out and the hole that’s remaining / Is a measure of how you will be missed.”

If the metaphor is true, if we leave no meaningful mark on people or events, have our lives mattered? And, if so, why should we care?

Apparently, my current plodding effort to produce an engaging autobiography reveals my own need to leave a legacy, proof and validation of my existence

I articulate this idea in the my poem, What Will Matter: "What will matter is not how many people you knew, but how many will feel a lasting loss when you’re gone. What will matter are not your memories, but the memories of those whose lives you touched. What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom and for what."

Being remembered is part of mattering. The need to be remembered drove pharaohs to build pyramids, millionaires to pay to have buildings bear their names and scientists to name their discoveries after themselves.

Putting aside the fact that embedding one's name in a lasting form does not necessarily convey any knowledge, affection or respect for the person named, this form of immortality is limited to very few whose wealth or heroism allows grand gestures.

Us more common folks need to be content with less dramatic but no less profound impact - to be remembered well by those who knew us, those we loved, and especially, our children and their children.

I confess that when I've felt the hurt of neglect or ingratitude, I've sometimes thought, "You’ll be sorry some day when you realize how you treated me." I imagined with "I told you so" pleasure , my inconsiderate wound-inflictors wracked with guilt sobbing at my funeral pleading for forgiveness. And, upon becoming aware of this vindictive curse I've become completely ashamed of these petty thoughts and shocked that I would wish any kind of pain on those I love.

So, what do I want?

I do want my parting to evoke deep positive feelings, but not of grief, guilt or regret. The modern conception of a funeral as a celebration of life (though a bit syrupy) captures the sentiment best.

I would like to be remembered for the good things I did and said, but I'd also like to be missed. And that's a very different state of mind.

We are missed when someone who knew us sees, hears or otherwise experiences something that causes them to think of us ("He would love/hate this." "Sounds like something he'd say."). We are missed when the experience generates a warm fond thought., "I wish he was still here."

Healthy missing, the kind I hope my absence evokes, must not be tainted with regret, grief or guilt. It' may be bittersweet and a bit sad, but it must not be painful. The kind of missing I wish on those who loved me is not constant or pervasive. It should be triggered by moments that awaken good memories and with a faint taste of gratitude and loss that honors my contribution to their lives, and it should pass gently.

In those who were a major part of my life, I hope they feel pride because they were a part of whatever I did or became. I hope to truly earn the epitaph - a good teacher, a good husband, a good father -- a good man.

In gathering information for my autobiography I found myself wandering in a forest of long-forgotten feelings - falling in love, being thoroughly enthralled with fathering my young children -- and I miss those times. What I underestimated was that recognition that I cannot again experience first-hand those feelings that I could still find real joy re-experience shadows of those feelings.

I hope my children, all the women I've loved, my siblings, nieces and nephews, and even those I never met but touched through my teachings to miss me. I hope they will maintain and occasionally visit a museum in their minds of things I said or did, leaving with a sense of gratitude that I was once in their lives. T

Isn't that immortality?