The hard truth about dying is that life goes on without you, and faster than you’d think.
Your job posts your role within two weeks. Your mug gets boxed up by someone who never knew you used it. Your house gets sold and most of the things you loved get donated. Your dog learns to love a new person. Your friends keep taking the trips you used to take together.
This isn’t cruel. It’s just true. The world has its own momentum, and it doesn’t pause for the people who leave it. The people who loved you grieve, deeply and for a long time, but even they have to keep getting up in the morning. They go back to work. They laugh at something on a Tuesday afternoon. They forget for a whole hour and then feel guilty about it. That’s how it is.
Most of us are not going to be remembered by the world. We are not going to have buildings named after us. We are not going to be in textbooks. Even the people who do leave that kind of mark are mostly forgotten within a generation or two. We carry vague impressions of someone’s great-grandparents, but not their voice. Not the way they laughed. Not what they cared about. The scale of being remembered, in any public way, is just so much smaller than we tend to imagine.
And yet, somehow, we still matter. Not to history. To the people we were with.
I’ve been thinking about legacy and presence, and the way we get them confused. Legacy is what we leave behind. Presence is who we are while we’re here. They’re connected, but they’re not the same.
We worry about what people will say at our funeral. Or alternatively, we avoid thinking about death at all. We curate how we are seen, and by virtue, how we’ll be remembered. We post things online that we hope will outlast us. But the curating itself pulls us out of the moments we’re trying to be known and remembered for.
The people who actually leave a lasting mark were rarely curating themselves toward one. They were just there, with the people in front of them, while they could be.
There is a quiet ache I notice everywhere right now. Millennials switching to dumb phones. The resurgence of vinyl records. The longing for slower mornings, neighbourhood coffee shops, and a version of life that feels less fragmented.
We talk about it like nostalgia. Like we miss the music, the clothes, or the pace of life. But I don’t think that’s really what we miss.
I think we miss the way people were with each other.
You remember it, even if you only caught the tail end of it. Bikes rolling out of the garage after breakfast and not coming home until the streetlights came on. Neighbours who knew each other. Long dinners that turned into longer conversations. When you were with someone, you were usually with them. The thousand other places you could be, mentally and emotionally, weren’t constantly competing for your attention.
And somewhere along the way, we’ve traded some of that away.
Not intentionally. Most of us are doing the best we can. But many of us are carrying a quiet sense that something is missing. Maybe that feeling isn’t burnout or stress. Maybe it’s wisdom asking us to pay attention again.
To ask ourselves how people experience us when they’re with us. Whether we’re actually showing up for the moments we say matter most. Because if I sit with the reality that I could be gone tomorrow, the question isn’t whether I’ve been perfect. The question is whether I’ve been present. Whether the people I love feel known by me while I’m still here.
At some point, life stops being about arriving somewhere. It just becomes about being in it.
Because the 90s didn’t take presence with them. Presence is still here. It costs nothing. You just have to learn to be where you are again.
The people who will remember you, when you are gone, will not remember your achievements. They will remember how you made them feel when they were sitting across from you. Whether you actually looked up. Whether they felt acknowledged by you. The small things you don’t think anyone notices. The way you said their name. The way you never forgot their birthday. The way you laughed.
You are small. The world is huge. Life will go on without you when you go.
But for the people who know you, you are not small at all. How you choose to be with people, really with them, while you still can, is going to shape most of what they carry forward of you.
That is the legacy. And it is right here, waiting for you.
A friend of mine died young. The friend group had custom cowboy boots made in his memory. The women’s are light tan, the men’s are dark brown, his initials are stitched in the toe, and each of ours are on the pull tabs on the side, with custom art from one of our other friends stitched on the tall part of the boot. I think of him every single time I wear them. Which I absolutely love!
So, if I die young, I want my people to get something made in my memory. I haven’t picked the exact thing yet. Something you would actually wear. Something that pulls me back into the room every time you put it on.
Have you thought about if there is something specific you’d want if you die? Have you shared it with anyone?