I’ve never really cared about my legacy, and then I read the obituary of a crazy racist.
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I was raised in South Carolina, though I haven’t lived there now for close to 30 years. That’s irrelevant, though. As any of you with a social media network knows, we never really leave our hometowns anymore. We may physically move away but the likes, pokes, friend requests and news feeds keep those childhood friends and places popping up like digital prairie dogs.
That’s how the following headline landed in my lap: “Barbecue eatery owner, segregationist Maurice Bessinger dies at 83.” Talk about an attention grabber. I didn’t know whether to regret the loss of a life and the passing of a barbecue master, or feel relieved that there was one less racist stomping around my old home. Neither did the obituary’s author, apparently, who covered both Bessinger’s tasty food and tasteless politics. And nor did the Bessinger family, who vowed to keep serving daddy’s delicious barbecue without his signature side of crazy racism.
The whole thing reminded me of a therapy visit years ago, where my therapist sent me home to write my own obituary. I worried over that assignment for days and came up empty.
“Why don’t you think you could write it?” she asked during my next visit.
“I’m not ready to confront the third ghost,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“You know, Dickens. A Christmas Carol.”
But I’m ready to face that ugly bastard now, and here’s the thing: I still don’t care how I’m remembered in the monumental sense of the phrase. I have no eye toward my name outliving me; no, I will die someday and my crap will be sold off by an estate liquidator for pennies on the dollar. If I’m lucky I’ll keel over in a state that allows earthly remains to become plant food, so at least I’ll get one last shot at recycling. And that will be that. I will be less of a mark on the human record than the dead parrot in that Monty Python sketch.
My writing life won’t matter, either, but it will. It will matter to my only true legacy, which of course is my children. I’ll be happy knowing I haven’t left them to apologize for me while still offering my amazing barbecue at family-friendly prices. If they remember me as a good man and get a kick out of reading the articles I left behind; well, that’s good enough for me.
But that’s enough about my future, less heart-beaty me. This particular post is all about you: How do you want to be remembered?
— photo public domain / Wikimedia Commons
Wasn’t it Mr Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, whom after he saw several extremely negative obituaries branding him as the ‘merchant of death’ when his brother died, created the Nobel Peace Prize?
In Memoria
I will be the ghost of reassurance
to anyone whose journey I have shared.
I will be there suffused through memory’s ravines.
I’ve been thinking about this question lately, as I work on a genealogical history of my paternal ancestors in Sicily. Being transgender and not in contact with many of my family members has brought me into contact with those of my relatives who have also attempted to document our genealogy, and forced me to come out to great-uncles and cousins-once-removed who I’ve never really met, but of whom I know at least some of how they wanted to be remembered. I appear in some of those histories with the wrong name. How would I be remembered by my descendants in… Read more »
I’ve actually though about this quite recently. They ask about living wills and your religious preference when undergoing surgery. Sometimes people don’t wake up.
I like Frank Sinatra’s the best.
“I would like to be remembered as a man who had a wonderful time living life, a man who had good friends, fine family – and I don’t think I could ask for anything more than that, actually.”