How Will the World Remember Your Life?

One of my high school classmates passed away recently. We weren’t friends but I was funny, he was funny, and we got along well enough in school. We golfed once, after high school, with a couple of other friends. He drank a beer a hole, which was not something I could keep up with.

The only time I impressed him was one evening when I drank several beers without apparent effect. I don’t know how I did it but I definitely drank the beers. That was the sort of thing he cared about back then.

As our interests and lives diverged, we lost contact. Hit obituary popped up in my Facebook feed, and that’s that. He was survived by a couple of kids.

Got me thinking about my own mortality, especially having survived my run-in with cancer this past summer. (Yes, I'm making his death about me.)

We are all going to die. There is no easy way to say it, but it’s true. Luckily, most of us have an ability to not worry about it, to go about our day to day as if everything is fine.

I depend on it for how I plan my writing: I plan my creative projects as if I’m going to live forever; I live each day like it’s my last.

That is, I try to do my art each day, along with taking care of my family and fulfilling any obligations.

When it comes time to plan, and I have to set priorities, I work on projects I think best represent my views of life and this world, and how I’d like people to remember me.

It’s not a bad way to approach your art.

The New York Times recently ran a guest essay by Kelly McMasters, who writes her own eulogy every year to bring clarity to how she’s living her life.

The short version is it helps her assess how she’s doing, reminds her of what she hoped to accomplish, and maybe changes what she’s going to do in the coming year.

If that seems too macabre, a variation I do is to write myself a letter each year with things I hope to accomplish. I nail it to a wall by my desk.

The funny thing is, I forget about it. It’s like it’s hiding in plain sight, fading into the background from familiarity. Then, every month or so, I notice it and look it over. It helps me adjust my plans with the bonus of not reminding me I’m going to die someday.

It’s absolutely fine if your obituary reads so-and-so is survived by his pet goldfish, Arthur and his snail, Gary. There’s no requirement to do anything.

Should you want to be remembered for something in particular, writing a letter to yourself, or writing your eulogy, may help you focus on making, or doing, that thing, in the coming year.

The eulogy or letter to yourself doesn’t have to be of a certain length or style. Like life itself, the form is entirely up to you.

I enjoy writing in cursive, so that’s how I do it. Nice pen, nice paper, and sit quietly in a comfortable chair and write.

You could type it on an old typewriter, or save a file on your computer.

A bit fancier digital version is to send an email to yourself, and use the recently available scheduling features to have it arrive in a year, prompting you to read it and assess how things went.

It might just be the sort of thing that brings you into the studio to do your art. I hope you have fun making whatever it is you make.