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How one wants to be remembered is not only about a legacy left after we die, it is also about the small memories that we leave behind us in each encounter – large and small. I have found myself wondering how others would remember me.
How would:
- The clerk at the grocery store remember me?
- Co-workers at various jobs?
- The interns I supervised?
- The taxi-driver that chose a longer route than I wanted?
- Would I be remembered as the life of the party or the person who didn’t say anything at all?
- What traces have I left in the places I’ve lived and visited?
Do I even care to be remembered?
A blogpost, “Why do you remember some people and completely forget others?” quotes Terrence Gargiulo:
“A story is the shortest distance between two people.”
The author, Mark, writes that, “If you want people to remember you, tell them a story.”
Sharing stories is the premise behind the well-known oral story history projects, The Story Corps and The History Makers.
StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of their lives. Since 2003, over 50,000 everyday people have interviewed family and friends through their efforts. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD and is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind.
The HistoryMakers is the largest archival collection of its kind in the world. Its goal is to complete 5,000 interviews of both well-known and unsung African American HistoryMakers. It includes the stories of individual African Americans along with those of African American organizations, events, movements and periods of time that are significant to the African American community.
- Who do I remember and why?
- Do I pay full attention to my friends when I talk to them?
- With whom do I connect and who have I missed?
Recently, a lovely women who I worked with on a couple of committees passed after a year-long bout with pancreatic cancer. Like other “work-friends” I learned more about her in her illness and after she passed than I had during her life, largely because a community of caring friends was created online and organized to make her comfortable, put her affairs in order, and get acknowledgment for her achievements while she was still here. In their actions, I saw that she felt loved, appreciated and respected by their actions in response to her service during her life.
When I visited her in the hospital, she was a shadow of her previously strong physical and strikingly-beautiful self. It hurt to see her so reduced.
“It was a shame…that last impressions were so often the ones which endured. How many of us would want to be remembered for what we finally became, rather than for what we were?”
(This quote, from the protagonist of the novel, Wish Her Safe at Home, speaks about appearances: youth versus beauty, health versus decay.)
Thinking about legacy is not just the province of those of us who are mid-lifers or older. Students from around the world, participating in the Virtues Project, share their thoughts about how they’d like to be remembered. The students’ discussions in the Virtues project are compiled in Virtues, A Book of Inner and Outer World) and launched at the iEARN Regional Conference in Amman-Jordan in the summer of 2004.
Jamie Massarelli, a student at Notre Dame Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts shares how she would like to be remembered:
After I die, hopefully many years from now, I pray that everyone will have great things to say about me and remember me. I strive to be the best person I can be, so that I have made an impact on other peoples' lives. These are some of the things that I would want people to say about me when I have died and hopefully gone to heaven.
Does thinking about the legacy you will leave behind cause you to live differently? Would it make you live self-consciously? Would knowing that in every action you are in fact leaving something be a burden or a release?
“Another question you must ask yourself is this. When finally your Book of Life is closed – will it be a success story?
A success story."
(From Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar)
The idea of my legacy, of what I want to be remember for,
