You Will Not Be Remembered

When I lived in New England my job took me through many small villages where I frequently found a cemetery near the town square. I often stopped to walk through them. They contained so many stories. The headstones were old, the carved inscriptions so worn I had to trace their impressions with my finger to discern the names or the dates. Time and again there was a mother buried next to a newborn. A story. Or a husband buried thirty years earlier than his wife. A story. Or the wife and husband buried together on the same day. A story. I wondered if there were any family members left further down the line of these long dead people, and if so did they know the stories? I doubted it. Often enough a century had gone by. If some distant relative possessed the cherished family Bible, the family tree scratched in with a fountain pen and dark blue ink, it likely hadn’t been opened in years, perhaps only treasured as an artifact, but not as something that held stories.

After many visits to many cemeteries over thirty years I came to understand this bracing truth: I will not be remembered. I have neither children nor family Bible. I won’t be buried in a cemetery with a carved stone. I hope to be composted or buried at sea, so within a short passage of time—a decade at the outside—I will not be remembered. There will be no evidence left of my life. Of course friends, who themselves will soon be dead, will remember me for a short while. But it won’t take long before they’re gone, too. Think of your own great great grandmother. What was her name? Was she loved by her children? Did she have a pretty face?

At first that seemed like a grim truth. Then it felt like a glorious relief. I won’t be remembered! When I grasped the breathtaking severity of that certainty, I had an exquisite feeling of every door swinging wide open right before every wall fell down and there was nothing between me and all of creation. The freedom of being accountable to nothing but my own deep heart is exhilarating. I can bushwhack my way to the far reaches of the fertile edge and fail and fail and fail as I try to get to a place creatively that I have never been before, finding a way to say something that feels important to me without feeling bound by any obligations incurred by needing to be remembered, or watched, or counted on, without being hamstrung by the obligation not to fail. I get the purity of exploration.

The difficult part for me is to stay aware of this fact, so the desire to be remembered doesn’t muscle its way back in and temper my exploration. If I grasp fully that it’s just me and the creative force, if I sally forth to the edge with no intention of returning and no need to be found because it’s not possible to get lost, what might happen to my creative life? It will expand. Failure drops away as a concept. Failing is the abundance I get to experiment with. I discover where I’ve put up a false barrier and go beyond it.

You will not be remembered, either. So do what you love.