Several years ago, I sat through a funeral service that would have been comical had it not been about death. The person in the casket had been a philanderer of the first order, and his deeds had occurred over a long span of years. Much of the community knew about those deeds. But we were told in the service that, during the final hours of life, the person found Christ and was forgiven. Pardon my cynicism, but I surmised the amazing retelling was more for the benefit of how others would see the remaining family. Politicos are quick to pick up on verbal manipulation. Yes, it was hard not to laugh, let alone smile during that service.
The truth of that funeral and a raft of stories we hear and see in our day-to-day lives is that death doesn’t launder a life. We can hold two thoughts at once, as I did in that Plainfield funeral home. A death may be awful, and the person who died may have earned every bit of the condemnation attached to their name. But people often pretend that the second part should be politely boxed up and stored away, as though the final pages rewrite the entire book. I know a thing or two about books. All the pages that come before matter. They are the stubborn words on the page that cannot be erased.
When someone who spent their years cheating, harming, crossing red lines but then dies in a way that feels cruel, there’s a reflexive reaction of No one deserves that. And perhaps that’s true. But then comes the next step when people start rewriting the person’s biography, smoothing out the ugliness, and elevating them into a figure of sympathy. That is when the trouble begins. That’s where we start pretending that the ledger of a life can be balanced by the manner of its ending.
A person’s legacy is built in the slow, daily accumulation of choices. It’s the pattern of behavior, not the punctuation mark of death at the end that matters. As a reader of history and politicians, it’s obvious that people authored their own reputation long before death arrived. So, it is also obvious that death is not a reset button for a new narrative. It freezes the record in the book’s last chapter. (If this all sounds rather common sense, that is the point.)
If someone lived underhandedly, that is the story. If someone lived wretchedly, that is the legacy. And no amount of spin can rewrite the simple, stubborn fact that how we live is what endures.
Leave a comment