Blog Posts

Remember or Be Remembered

Earlier this year, an elderly neighbor of ours died after a long illness. When we moved into our house 20 years ago, we came to know her only in passing. She was the old woman who slowly walked her collie past our house three times a day. The sum total of my knowledge about her was the long, camel-hair overcoat she wore in cold weather and the wreath of snow-white, thick hair that adorned her head.

A few years back it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her in a while. I learned from another neighbor that she had become sick and wasn’t up to walking her dog anymore. I made a note of that in my mind and must confess I never gave it a second thought.

So when I heard she had died, I didn’t think much of it—until I read her obituary in the local paper the next day. I was surprised to learn that this woman had lived an accomplished and fascinating life. Valedictorian of her high school class. Graduate of a prestigious college in New England. Assistant to several professors at Harvard in both the physics and government departments, where she worked with two future National Security advisors at the starts of their careers

When she, her husband and their children moved to our neighborhood almost 40 years ago, she threw herself into volunteer work. As president of the county chapter of an organization dedicated to helping people with intellectual disabilities, she wrested it back from the brink of bankruptcy, setting it on a firm financial footing that continues to this day. An amateur singer, an accomplished bridge player and an avid reader, she led a full life. And I was chagrined and embarrassed that I had only thought of her as that old lady who walked her dog.

Now that I’m at the stage of my life when there is more sand in the bottom of the hourglass than there is in the top, I have started to ponder the transitory nature of my own accomplishments in life. And I began to wonder, “How do I want to be remembered?”

So, as any tech-savvy person would do today, I Googled the phrase, “How do I want to be remembered?” In less than a second, my inquiry produced 120 million hits. Clearly, I am not alone in my curiosity about this subject.

As I began to read through the top hits to my search, the responses were almost entirely predictable. People want to be remembered as someone who made a difference in other people’s lives—whether by their family or their community or on some larger stage. And we know that stretching back into ancient times, people have sought to leave behind something that will remind others that they once lived: everything from scrapbooks and autobiographies to granite gravestones and impressive monuments.

But how important are these things, really? While one’s genetic material can be transmitted down the generations, the memories of our lives are usually lost within just a few years. So rather than worry about how I will be remembered, perhaps I should focus on learning more about those who are still around.

I think of how much richer my own life would have been had I known that just a few doors down from me lived a woman whose life was lived in full, and how much I could have learned from her had I taken the time to know her. And how many others like her are around me—down the block, in the pew in front of me at church or at work?

So I am going to try to spend more time thinking about how I can learn from the older people I know. To paraphrase a Chinese proverb, an elderly person is a living treasure of gold. So I’m going on a hunt for gold, because the life stories of those who have lived a long life can serve as an inspiration to my own.