This past December, my maternal grandfather passed away. I came back to Fayetteville, NC after the funeral in Tennessee with one of the carnations that was used as part of the floral arrangement on the casket. I put it in a small vase and placed it on my desk between a pencil holder and a wooden business card box – both of which were my grandfather’s before he gave them to me. I then took a picture of the arrangement and saved it as my memorial to him. When the flower finally faded a few days later, I put it in my grandfather’s Bible where it has rested ever since.
Memorial. That’s a hard word to quantify in any circumstance. They are services, monuments and collections of personal items among other things. But I think above all of those things, memorials are a collection of stories that create a legacy. There are many memorials in every town of this country and each of them tells stories or asks us to remember stories about why those memorials exist.
We all know that at some point, we too will pass on and leave those living on earth behind – that’s simply a fact of life. Unfortunately, some of us are put in positions where that may happen much sooner than anticipated. Those included in this category are soldiers who dodge bullets and resistance from enemy forces, those who do particularly dangerous jobs such as miners, crab fishermen and builders, and sadly, those who have been diagnosed with life-threatening or terminal conditions.
But there is one thing that all of us share in and through our everyday lives, and that is the stories of our lives. The stories themselves have a much greater chance of surviving long past our existence because our family and friends are enamoured by them so much. And by the same token, most great stories that have stood the test of time are simply short tales that have been repeated over and over and over again to the point that they are no longer stories, but histories.
Now, in the digital age, we have an opportunity to tell our own stories for all time and people are starting to take up the idea. One such example is Jason Meadows and his song “18 Videotapes” which tells the life of a man who knows he is going to die before his next child is born and he wants to give him/her the lessons of life – even if it is on videotape. Another still is my grandfather – who took the time to tell us (and history) about his life through a self published autobiography.
These are just two ways we can take life into our own hands and explain it to all who will listen what life is from our perspective. One is tragically unnecessary, but is available to all people. The other is also available, but when is the right time to do it?
But because we have these self-made testimonials, the lives of the people who made them will be known for as long as the data is in existence. They could be locked up in a chest, only to be discovered decades later and played back – the same experience we have when we look at old film and pictures.
Life and its experiences are worth saving – because so long as there is evidence of how our forefathers ran their own lives, we’ll never know what we have…till we’ve seen their experiences.
The human struggle is in a constant state of repetition – the difference being that each generation must meet its challenges with the methods, technologies and even social mores of the time. In that struggle though, there is a commonality between my mother’s experience in having children and her father’s – and those experiences can only be learned from by myself and, likewise, my children.
Saving these stories of life and how we live it then serves two great purposes. One, it allows future generations to learn from and about their ancestors. And two, saving their voices and pictures means that their lives really never die because we have them and we can view them anytime we want.
Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I will be extending to you ways that you can create appropriate and honest collections of a person’s life so that after they are gone, you’ll have as much of a full picture of their life as possible.
And when that person does go, you’ll realize that you never knew what you have…till you’ve got it.
