linnposts.com

(In these waning “Dog Days” of summer, here is something I wrote a while ago I want to share, for what it’s worth).

“Private Practice” was a drama on television a few years ago about a group of doctors running a clinic in southern California. In one episode two of the doctors, Pete and Sam, are spending time with a dying older doctor who had mentored both of them, brilliantly played by Broadway actor Joel Grey. When Sam gives him the news that the chemo is not helping, he and Pete tell their old friend they will both be there to help him with the pain.

What they soon find out is that their mentor wants something more from them. He wants his younger colleagues to induce his own death.

That sets off a debate between Sam and Pete about complying with his request. Pete wants to. Sam does not. The argument between them becomes a powerful debate about assisted suicide.

But for me that was a secondary issue to what happens as death draws near. In his pain the dying friend starts weeping and admits that he is afraid of dying, not because he fears death, but because he wonders if he will be forever forgotten.

“I have no one,” he says. “They’re all on the other side. The world will spin without me. It will be as if I were never here.”

Pete goes to his bed and takes his friend in his arms, pulls him close and rocks him as if he were rocking a child, and says gently, “You were here…you were here.” He repeats it again and again, “You were here, you were here.” Pete continues to rock his friend as if lost in another world until Sam touches him on the shoulder and says, “Pete, he’s gone.” At the moment Pete breaks down and cries. Sam then says, “He was here. He was here.”

I think all of us want to know that when we die somebody will remember we were here. I am comforted in knowing those who love me now will not forget I was here once I’m gone, but sometimes I wonder about it anyway. I still think about my dad who died when I was only 32 years old, and one of my older brothers who died when I was 46. I will never forget they were here.

Death, of course, is the great equalizer. Kings and peasants, the rich and the poor, the known and the unknown, we all die. What we are or have been cannot change the inevitable. We are born and we die.

But that episode of “Private Practice” made me own up to the fact that once in a while I do fear I will be forgotten when I die. It’s not true, of course. Just as I have not forgotten the people I have known and especially those I loved – and still love – who have died. Most of the time I realize the same thing will happen when I die. I will not be forgotten by my family or close friends. Perhaps there will be others I wouldn’t expect who will remember I was here.

But feelings are by nature non-rational, so what I know is not always able to alter what I feel. Most days I am content to live and not think about dying or what the lives of others will be like when I do. Once in a while, though, I do think about it.

I love being alive, and I am slowly beginning to realize that it is this love of living that lies at the root of my fear that when I die it will be as if I were never here. I think that is actually okay, as long as I don’t allow fear of being forgotten to cause me to miss even a single moment of living now.

When Thoreau said he went to the woods to see what he could learn so that when it came time for him to die he would not discover that he had never lived, he named the real enemy of life. It is coming to the end of life and realizing we missed the one we had been given.

So even though it is a normal desire to want others to know we were here once we are gone, I think it matters more that we live the days we have while we are.