How Will I Be Remembered?

In honor of my grandfather, who lived every day with joy in his heart.

Vincent Van Patten

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I stood in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, staring up at the sky as if in a dream. I couldn’t walk or run; I could only standstill. A haze of sunlight and rain changed the light every few minutes, leaving a spectrum of colors in its wake.

I gazed above, marveling at the universe fully displaying its power, like a reflection of joy lingering in the clouds.

Seeing each color so finely defined from the others made me feel human. We can explain the science of a rainbow, but there’s still something heavenly about them.

We equate color with life, as a body bereft of color ceases to exist. The heart no longer works, the limbs are immovable, and the color that once filled the body fades.

However, we remember the body by the spirit it contained. The body is just the home of the soul, a gift, although fleeting.

I see cemeteries as a window into the past of a place and culture. I see them as a celebration of life. The bodies that lay in the earth have likely decayed, but the names still hold significance.

On the gravestone, the name is the first thing we recognize. Some names transcend time and become fixed in history, the name as strong as the soul to which it’s attached.

Then a message, a few words to encapsulate the human spirit. Perhaps it will only make sense to friends and family, but then what of somebody like me? A foreigner — what do I make of it the words inscribed?

The world around me settled; the only sound the softly falling rain. What will my tombstone read when my spirit leaves the earth, I wondered?

How will I be remembered?

What we do every day determines how we’ll be remembered when our name is nothing more than a memory, carried in the wind through the perennial connection of the human spirit.

After a few generations, seldom more than the name remains to keep our ancestors in our memories. After a few hundred years, it seems like an entirely different world which our great-great-grandparents called home.

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Vincent Van Patten

Exploring what lights my soul on fire ❤️‍🔥 Living in Japan. vincentvanpatten.com