How would you like to be remembered?

by Lional Wijesiri

About a 100 years ago, a man looked at the morning newspaper and to his surprise and horror, read his name in the obituary column. The newspapers had reported the death of the wrong person by mistake. His first response was shock. Am I here or there? When he regained his composure, his second thought was to find out what people had said about him.

The obituary read, “Dynamite King Dies.” And also “He was the merchant of death.” This man was the inventor of dynamite and when he read the words “merchant of death,” he asked himself a question, “Is this how I am going to be remembered?”

He got in touch with his feelings and decided that this was not the way he wanted to be remembered. From that day on, he started working toward peace. His name was Alfred Nobel and he is remembered today by the great Nobel Prize.

Gayani’s story

I was reading this little story last week in a social magazine when suddenly it reminded me of someone I knew (let me call her Gayani). On January 1, 1999, she passed away suddenly at forty-one. She was healthy and never expected to be faced with a sudden death. I was paying my last respects to her when I met some of her friends who were talking about her death and her life.

They didn’t say anything bad. Everybody agreed that Gayani was a nice person. She meant well. But the words about her were more polite ways of honouring a nice person who had died than accolades or accomplishments. At her funeral the attributions were similar.

I was curious and asked about what dreams she had that she’d made real. I heard about the book she planned to write one day and the charity she was trying to make time to help with. But she’d postponed it all for the future, which now was over.

Gayani had put off doing the things that mattered to her most in the name of being practical. She was waiting for prices to go down before she took the trip to Lourdes she longed for. Her need to do chores on time meant she chose laundry and marketing over helping at a charity event.

Gayani was always waiting for the right time to do all the things she wanted to do. She stayed at the job she hated because she was afraid of not being able to get one that interested her and felt she should be grateful for an income where she was.

What made an impact on me while I listened to her friends was how my first thought was when one day I pass away, I didn’t want people to remember me the way they remember Gayani.

Not too late

You never know when your time will come but I’m sure you’d liked to be remembered in a positive way for doing what matters to you. I believe that being conscious of how you want people to remember you helps you make better choices.

Personally, I want to be remembered for doing good deeds but also for being a strong confident man who has taken good care of himself. I try to live with integrity and therefore, I should not be remembered as someone who doesn’t keep his word or uses people. I also want to be remembered for helping people through my writing.

So how do you want to be remembered? If you have completed four decades in your life, it is time you need to turn inward. You can begin by auditing your life.

The Balance Sheet will reveal what has to be done in the next decade or two to create a set of better final accounts. Sooner or later, the day will arrive that you will be compelled to audit your full life. On that day, if you could look back and smile, you would have lived a purposeful life.

Peter Drucker

If you are in the corporate sector, you would have heard about Peter Drucker. He was an Austrian-born American management consultant, educator, and author, whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of the modern business corporation

Drucker was always asking the question, “What do you want to be remembered for?” from his corporate clients and his university students. He asked it of himself. “It is a question that induces you to renew yourself,” Drucker wrote, “because it pushes you to see yourself as a different person - the person you can become.”

For those in business, the question is also a powerful reminder that there is more to what they do than simply trying to maximise profits - or at least there should be.

As for Drucker, he was first asked, “What do you want to be remembered for?” when he was a 13-year-old schoolboy in Austria, and his teacher, posed the question to the class. At that tender age, Drucker recalled, “None of us, of course, could answer it.”

“I didn’t expect you to be able to answer it,” the teacher replied. “But if you still can’t answer it by the time you’re 50, you will have wasted your life.”

Drucker noted that he and some of his classmates began to wrestle with the question in earnest when they were about 25, though most of them “answered it foolishly” at that point.

That’s not surprising. What you want to be remembered for should change both with one’s own maturity and with changes in the world, Drucker observed. Over the course of the next 70 years, Drucker settled finally on his answer - one that that is both humble and inspiring. “My definition of success changed a long time ago,” he said. “Making a difference in a few lives is a worthy goal. Having enabled a few people to do the things they want to do, that’s really what I want to be remembered for?”

Epitaph

Last Tuesday afternoon, after attending a funeral, I spent some time at the local cemetery slowly wandering around the tombstones and reading the epitaphs. Some of them were quite catchy. I was beginning to wonder once again how I will be remembered after death. 

I turned around towards my friend who was accompanying me and asked him, “How would you like your epitaph to be written?” It took him a while to answer me. Finally, he said,” I cannot think of what I want to be written but do know what I do not want to be written.’

“It is something like this,” he added, “He was just an average in-transit visitor to Planet Earth. He existed just over 70 years. His last words were, “I could not finish the work why I came here. Not even to begin.”

Even today I do not understand why my friend ended up as a professional Accountant instead of a philosopher.