A Loss And Leaving Last Impressions

 My ordinary daily routine involves me checking my Book Of Face account once every day or once every two days - on the whole, I tend to flitter by what people post and most of what they do post is mostly either humor or personal stories about them and their families, something that can be reviewed whenever and has a minimal impact on my life.  

In the case of last Friday, I was flitting through waiting for an event to start when I saw a picture of friend on another's friend's feed with a comment along the lines of "Gone, but not forgotten".  This puzzled my brain and I went and looked more directly on his page.

Yes, it was true.  He had died the day before.

I had met G at a Highland Games event 6 or 7 years ago.  We are grouped together by age and sex and so, over time, you come to see the same people throwing in your neck of the woods.  The whole thing becomes something of a slow rolling family reunion as you see people the same people multiple times in the same year.  Some are just people you see and throw with, but others you strike a chord with and become a bit more than just "throwing buddies".  

Such were G and myself.  We were both at the lower end of the performance scale, but over the years we both got better and encouraged each other.  It came to be where he was one of the people I looked forward to seeing every game he was at, as we would constantly encourage each other in our battle for last place.  In the off season, I would more likely follow his posts than he mine, as his were sometimes vociferous - but I found out that we shared an interest in old Post Apocalyptic Role Playing games and Science Fiction Games, for example. 

I had not seen him since the Autumn of 2019, pre-Plague.  I was looking forward to seeing him in only a few weeks.  

Now, that will never happen.

The cause of death was listed as "unexpected", which usually means a host of things, none of them good.  To satisfy my curiosity, I went to his page - he had posted something the morning of this death and judging from what he posted, he did not expect it to be his last post.  He was two years younger than I am, which of course got my attention.

And which, of course, ran me down a whole different course of thought.

I had already considered the fact of living each day as if it is one's last.  What I had not considered - and what I should have considered as well - is what one leaves behind every day, including the last day.

We - or more likely I - too often think that we will have some level of consciousness about our own demise, that we will see it coming and thus control our messaging on the way out.  In point of fact this is not so: every public appearance could be our last, every post could be our last, every "cutting remark" and "funny at the time" picture could exist as the last public memory of us out there.  

What kind of memory - in that sense - do I want to leave?

It has made me even more conscious - not that I was not already, I suppose - of what I am displaying and putting out as me, both here and in my real life in general.  What I should like to ensure is that even if the end comes "unexpectedly", the last thing that will be out there is not something that I should have or could have undone, if I had been given more time. 

It also makes me reconsider exactly what I am doing with my time and what I am messaging.  Is this the sort of thing that - were it my last post - I would want to leave?  Are the words I speak with anyone the last words I want them to remember of me?  Am I conscious that eternity looms around us not as some far off event but as a faint but ever present reality?

C.S. Lewis in his essay "The World's Last Night"  wrote the following:

"We can, perhaps, train ourselves to ask more and more often how the thing we are doing or saying (or failing to do) at each moment will look when the irresistible light streams in upon it; that light which is so different than the light of this world - and yet, even now, we know just enough to take it into account."

How often I do not consider my almost unconscious actions in the light of eternity.