I just had a comment on an old post from 2017. It was about a visit I made to a childhood haunt and two brothers that drowned there. Since then I have had two comments from people who also knew them, one of whom I also knew.
This got me thinking about the old saying about us all dying twice, once when we stop breathing and once when people forget us. It’s slightly more complex than that, as mot people die for the second time when the last person who knew them dies.
Others, such as Marilyn Monroe (to pick one at random) will not die as long as films are shown and Hollywood legends persist. Nor, you hope, will Shakespeare. What of Newton and Einstein? They are well known and legendary, but do we really know them in the same way we know an actor or a playwright?
And how about the bloggers? Laurie will be about for a while because of her books. The rest of us, I feel, are slightly less immortal, though we are likely to persist longer than non-bloggers, though only as pixelated phantoms, until Microsoft withdraws support from the internet and relaunches it as a pay-per-view service on its latest “new and improved” (sic) version of whatever it is working on at the time. They may, by this time, be pushing for the beatification of Bill Gates, though my enthusiasm for making him eternal ends at contributing to a project to have him stuffed and mounted.
So, what do you think about immortality.
Or having Bill Gates stuffed? He could join Lenin and Jeremy Bentham as part of a triumvirate of strange funereal practices.
I chose swans because the post on Orton Mere used a swan picture (the one at the bottom of this post, to be precise, and because of the connotation of “swan song”.
Oh boo. I thought that I was immortal.
In a way, you are. Your grandchildren will certainly treasure memories of you, and your prose will live on. 🙂
Immortality – an interesting question. No one knows what happens “over there”, as we have no tools to measure it, only a vast number of near-death experiences and other anecdotal accounts. I have seen and experienced a few things I cannot explain, and leave it at that.
I have seen several ghosts, which is tricky, as I don’t believe in them. 🙂
I’m ok with not having a legacy. I mattered to people while I was here. Better to know I mattered than die and people appreciate me post death….good post
I modelled this post on your style, but probably won’t do it again. I don’t know how you do it. Itt takes so much effort to be profound and I kept wanting to stick a joke in . . . 🙂
Hmmmm I don’t know profound I am, and note to self…nobody is getting my jokes…
Ooops! I fear my intellect is too shallow to appreciate the full width of your writing, and I merely process the profound parts . . . 🙂
😂😂
Did I get away with that? 🙂
😉
Yes, thought provoking and melancholy. My memories go back to my great-grandmother, who was born in the late 1800s. She has quite a few great-grandchildren who remember her, but when we are gone…
Many, many thanks for mentioning me.
I knew one of my great-grandmothers – I think only 2 of my aunts, me and my sister are alive of the people who knew her. Sobering thought That I am nearly at the end of the line.
I only knew one of my grandparents, the others died long before I was born.
Yes, three of mine died in the 1920s and 1930s. The fourth, and two of her sisters, all made it into the late 1960s. I also knew my grandmother’s aunt, who as healthy into the 1980s – iy was one of those things where they were a generation apart, but only about ten years apart in age.
Yes, yes.
🙂
A most thought-provoking post. I’d add the thought that we’ll never know who remembers us, and how.
That is true. It used to worry me that I wouldn’t get much of a turnout to my funeral but now, with one of the cheap and simple ones I can save money and hide ,y lack of friends. Wn-win. 🙂