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| One Day -- Looking Back |
Several years ago,
not long after I retired I was reading some Facebook posts and saw this thought
in one of the posts:
“One
day, you'll be just a memory for some people.
Do your best to be a good one.”
Retirement is a
separate stage of life and will create memories of its own. We create memories for ourselves, but more
importantly we create memories for other people with what we do.
When I first saw the
statement about trying to be a good memory I thought, "Wow that is
perceptive!" And I thought that
trying to be a good memory would be a good retirement goal. After I started publishing this blog I even
wrote a blog post about those thoughts, but I never was satisfied with what I
wrote so I never posted it. It is
probably a good thing because over time I have changed my opinion and I now think that doing my best to be a good memory would not be a good goal in
retirement.
This morning I received an
email that made me remember the thought above so I thought I would attempt a
rewrite. This blog post is the attempted rewrite.
The email was from
one of my very good friends letting us know that his mother had passed away in
the wee hours of the morning. This great
lady will now be just a memory for some people, and I know from previous conversations
with my friend that she will be a good one; but not because she tried to be a
good one.
Funerals are largely
times for remembering people. They are
times for remembering the person who has passed, but they are also times for
remember those who are left behind and how our lives have mingled with one another. I have heard people at funerals remember that
someone did something because that is just who they were, or because they
really had a passion for something, or because they just had a love of life or
of all of the people around them. But
never once have I heard at a funeral anyone say, "He or she tried to be a
good memory."
I now think our goal
in retirement should be to live as who we are, live according to our passions,
live according to who and what we love in life.
If we do that, the memories will take care of themselves.
