For Truth, Write Your Own Epitaph

Do you ever wonder what people will write about you after you’re gone? (Not that I have any frisson of leaving any time soon, let me assure you.)

Went down the rabbit hole at Find a Grave .com today, and looked back at about three to four generations of my family (perhaps 15–18 in all), most of whom I never met and so have no idea who they really were in life.

Quotes on one or two of the gravestones for those I knew were so terribly off the mark.

The few obituaries I read were mostly accurate, though one was so fulsome that no one could possibly be that person except in the mourning memories of those left behind.

Perhaps we all ought to start writing our own obituaries while we’re hale and hearty to make sure people remember who WE know we are…really.

I have changed so much over my lifetime, that anyone who is solely from my past putting pen to paper would be so incredibly wrong.

I’m not the person I was in the 1960s, or ’70s, or ’80s, or ‘90s.

I’m not the same person I was before the cancer dances.

I’m not the same person I was before I married Carle.

And I’m definitely not the same person I was before I started working as a psychic medium, wandering the Upper Roads between past and future, life and death.

True, some things haven’t changed: I’m still a wordsculptor. I still have an ability to make people laugh with a turn of phrase or a well-timed story. I am still fond of history, and music, and cats, and good food, and a kitchen challenge.

But that’s not enough to write an obituary with.

How could people who knew me Then understand the difference I have made in the world now? The difference I have made in me — the growth, the shedding of what was a mistaken identity, the acceptance?

When half your family dismisses everything you are now, intent on remembering the person you were, how can they possibly write anything that is truthful?

No, write your own epitaph, my friends.

Be sure that people have the truth of who you are — not the sanitized version, but all of you, beauty and shadow, loves and hates and fears and despairs, heart’s causes and fierce fires — and the final truths you learned about yourself and the world before you go through the one-way Door into Starlight.