What will your story be?
July 11, 2023
How do you think you’ll be remembered? How do you want to be remembered?
I was thinking about this four years ago and shelved it. It’s hovered in the back of my mind as I take notes for my elder friends I will have to write obituaries for.
It bubbled back up after a recent therapy session: What would people say about you at your funeral? What do people think of you as a person? What do YOU think of you?
It’s always made me wonder if people know how they’d be eulogized. What would be the summary of their existence?
I buried this post because I wasn’t ready for that level of introspection. I’m probably still not, given my reaction to similar questions in therapy (I make it a point NOT to think about that!)
Back in 2017….
I’ve kept JB alive for going on three years but that’s a reasonably human accomplishment. Besides, after the first year, that’s less of a hazard pay situation and more of a fight the toddler’s instinct to self destruct. Our home was the result of a lot of hard work but survival isn’t a true achievement. (Well, it is, but not in this context.)
My soul is searching for learning and doing. My brain is craving new things to read and do. BUT. My body says no. It is succumbing to fjaka. Weariness weighs down my limbs, lava boils my joints (metaphorically but I also feel it literally), and no amount of metaphorical browbeating can get them to buck up unless and until they’re ready.
My brain craves a hit of accomplishment dopamine very regularly, was satisfied by the tangible completion of the house renovation weekly, and now that I’m off that particular hook, I’m in serious withdrawal. For someone who usually believes she can do anything, being in an “idle” refortification phase of life feels both strange and sometimes deleterious.
Now in 2023….
With the addition of Smol Acrobat, I still feel like my achievement wheels are spinning in mud. I don’t know what matters for me.
I did pick up sewing which has been an incredibly painful, though satisfying, hobby, when I finally figure out how to do something new. I’ve learned how to attach zippers and sew packing cubes and I’ve repaired (sort of) my longtime travel backpack.
I still measure my successes in the tiniest of measuring cups: did we feed everyone with a minimum of stress this week? Did we make it to each commitment on time this week? (Usually) Did we help out a Lakota family this month? (Usually) Did we send a birthday card on time? (Sometimes)
How would you want to be remembered?
My hope is that I’ll be missed, that I meant enough to someone for my absence to matter. I hope I’ll have helped people.
Don’t know that I can ask for more than that.
I’m not expecting to die for a long time–far enough into the future that the people most likely to remember me for very long are my immediate family members. I expect to be mostly forgotten by my co-workers and my friends situation is on the empty side.
What I really mostly hope right now is that the mistakes I’ve made and the flaws I don’t outgrow are things that I can be loved through. I go through phases of feeling like I’m falling short, and the last couple of weeks have been marked by those feelings. I want to be remembered as a good mom, a good grandma (if my child has children), and a generally decent person.
The irrational part of me feels I won’t live past my mom’s death age, absolutely irrational I know, but in either case, I’m sure I won’t be remembered by more than my immediate and surrogate families.
Your hopes feel like very good things.
That’s a bit depressing! Can I be remembered like Betty White? As in, partly for being so active and so lucid at such an old age?
I know we just asked a similar question on our blog, but it was an ask the grumpies, so not one we would have come up with on our own. I guess some people find working towards big goals and having guiding principles useful. And maybe I have them and they’re just implicit so I don’t think about them (“An it hurts no one, do what you will…”). But I definitely live my life on a shorter time horizon. So much changes all the time, how can we predict long-term anything?
I didn’t mean for it to be depressing but I suspect that it inherently is based on how long it took me to be willing to think about it myself. It’s the whole writing a eulogy thing that keeps me coming back to the question. I’ve written one, and will need to write the other one eventually. I hope not for many many years from now. For this person I also hope they’re like Betty White.
I like the Betty White hope!
It’s a hard q but I love it.
I just know that I don’t want to be remembered as ‘nice’.
To paraphrase from a book I’m reading (Platonic, about friendship), and a quote I think maybe from Virginia Woolf? Eeek, prob misattributing, ‘I had to kill that woman before she killed me’.
Hahah I’ve never heard that quote before but I’d agree that no one who truly knows me would call me nice. I care about taking care of those who need help but am also quite cranky and disinclined to tolerate fools.