Attending a funeral yesterday brought this quote by Jean-Luc Picard (from Star Trek Generations) powerfully to mind, and made me ruminate once again about certain realities. The first of which is, “Tomorrow is never given.”

We never know when the bus will come to get us.¹

What is the measure of a person’s life? The funeral I attended was for a young husband and father, a well-beloved endodontist, who was taken too early in an automobile accident precipitated by a drunken driver. Many people turned out to send him off to his next life; many tears were shed, many good words spoken. He had a large family, his wife had a large family, and he will certainly be long remembered for his goodness.

But as memories fade and those who knew the person also move ahead, all that remains of a person’s life is often a gravestone with two dates: birth, death, and that little dash in the middle, which stands for everything that person did, thought, and was during their walk on this green earth.

Linda Ellis wrote a famous poem, “The Dash,” which begins thusly:

I read of a man who stood to speak at the funeral of a friend.
He referred to the dates on the tombstone from the beginning to the end.

He noted first came the date of the birth and spoke the following date with tears.
But he said what mattered most of all was the dash between the years.

For that dash represents all the time that they spent life on Earth.
And now only those who loved them know what that little line is worth.

But nothing lasts forever, not even stone. The natural processes that can wear down mountains or create the grand canyon over the course of millions of years will inexorably erase even the most beautifully-carved memorials, and then there is nothing to mark that person’s passage through mortality.

But I believe in giving everyone a shot at being remembered. My mother had a younger sister who lived less than two months. She was loved, and cherished, but for some unknown reason failed to thrive. She was buried in the same plot as her grandmother, with nothing there to indicate that she had even existed. While it’s the sad truth that countless individuals upon the earth have no graves or are buried in unmarked locations, I found myself in a position to do something for my little aunt, and had a marker prepared and set in the appropriate location.

Someday it, too, will be nothing but dust, but in the meantime those who wander Wasatch Lawn Memorial Park in Salt Lake City will be able to see and take note of her passage. And to me, that’s important.

As the title of this essay intimates, at some point – hopefully a while in the future yet – the bus will come for me. I wonder how I will be remembered? I’m an only child, and so is my wife. We have 7 kids between us, but only one remains active in our community of faith, and all are scattered around the country. It’s my intention to give my body to science² – I can see no point in paying thousands of dollars to have an old shell preserved when it might still do some good somewhere – so I don’t think I’ll have a grave anywhere, but I’d like to be memorialized in some way. A cenotaph³, perhaps? An entry over at FindAGrave? My Facebook site will hopefully be memorialized, but as we have seen, even the biggest entities don’t last forever. Even this blog, which contains many of my thoughts about the world around us, will someday go away, when the domain name is no longer renewed and WordPress is no longer paid.

Ultimately, all we are and all we did are known only to God, but our deeds in this life, like ripples in a pond, will continue to continue onwards in time through the effects of how we treated others, both for good and for ill. I can only hope that when the time comes for me to cross the river Styx and my heart is weighed against the feather of Ma’at, that I will not be found wanting.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Footnotes

¹This is a reference to a lovely and under-appreciated film starring a young Robert Downey, Jr., “Heart and Souls.”

² Unless this happens:

³A monument to someone whose remains are elsewhere