“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”
This quote by Sylvia Plath resonates with many people: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and otherwise. A lot of people feel pressure to make a life that “matters.” That means different things to different people. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted out of life until I figured out what it was about death that scared me. Actually, I owe that to Aretha Franklin.
Aretha doesn’t need much of an introduction: she’s the Queen of Soul. When she died, the president issued a statement. Many of the most influential people of our day dropped what they were doing to come to Detroit and pay their respects. There were more than 100 pink Cadillacs to honor Aretha. Streets were closed; it was a big deal.
But now, you can go visit Aretha Franklin, and it’s a completely different vibe. She’s interned at Woodlawn Cemetery in Detroit, just 20 minutes away from where I went to law school. So I went to visit her and pay my respects. And the most haunting thing about that was how absolutely lonely it was. No one was visiting Aretha and no flowers been left for her. No one was in the building she was in, or even the cemetery. This was someone with a monumental legacy, surrounded by thousands of people on the day she was laid to rest. And now here she was: completely alone and isolated in a basement in Detroit, Michigan.
My mom and I have visited many prominent figures from history at their graves, so I think about this a lot. The people we see are always someone who had a massive impact on our society in some way or another. We’ve seen Whitney Houston, Rosa Parks, Shirley Chisholm, Millard Fillmore, Nelly Bly, John Coltrane, John Jacob Astor IV, Jesse Owens, like all kinds of people. And for all they did and accomplished during their lives, they’re largely all alone in a box for eternity.
But at least they all did something that lived on. People listen to Whitney Houston and John Coltrane every day. Rosa Parks and Shirley Chisholm are a fixture in history textbooks across America. Their physical selves, no one really cares about, it seems. But because of their work, they live on.
So I feel pressure to make the most of my life, not just to maximize my potential but also to produce something that “matters”. After all, who wants to be forgotten? But even that is kind of silly. Eventually the earth will implode, and nothing any of us did will exist or matter. I try to keep that in mind when I second-guess putting myself out there. Because why should I care what anyone thinks when we all end up as cosmic dust with no memory of anything anyway?
Regardless. I still don’t want to sit in my deathbed and think that I wasted my life and potential. If anything, I should work to make my life matter to honor how lucky I am. I am very mindful that I have blessings that many others relentlessly pray for. It seems disrespectful to squander that.
So whatever it is, I better R-E-S-P-E-C-T my legacy and get around to it.