Why How Did They Die is The Wrong Question to Ask

The question comes fast, usually within the first minute, and it comes from good people who mean nothing by it: How did they die?

I understand the impulse. It's an attempt to find the edges of a thing too big to hold, and cause of death gives you somewhere to put your hands. Cancer, we say, and the other person nods, and something has been transacted.

Watch a family's face during that exchange, though. They answer it correctly and something closes. They've just summarized eighty-one years as a diagnosis, for the fourth time that day, to a person who asked kindly.

Then ask them the other question. How did she live. Watch what opens.

What a family might be aching to say

Maybe they’d rather tell you she took her tea so strong it was practically solid or that she cried at the national anthem every time she heard it. That she kept every card anyone ever sent her in a box under the bed, sorted by year. That she was a terrible driver but a genuinely amazing dancer.

That's the person. That's who died. The diagnosis is a detail about the last chapter.

There's a particular loneliness in the days after a death, when everyone around you is treating your person as an event and you are still living with them as a person. It's why people go quiet at their own gatherings. Nobody's asking them anything they actually want to answer.

There is a famous quote about grief and how it is love that has nowhere to go. I think the love is right there alongside the grief and they both still have somewhere they can go: remembrance.

What people actually remember

I’ve sat through a lot of services now. Here is what is hardly ever mentioned afterward. The casket. The flowers. Whether the songs or readings were the proper choice or not.

What gets mentioned is that his old fishing partner stood up and couldn't get through it and finished anyway. That the friends all wore their red hats. That somebody put a bowl of caramels by the door because their mom always had one in her coat pocket, and a hundred and forty people took one on the way out without being told why.

Those caramels probably cost eleven dollars. That's the whole point. Meaning doesn't come from spending and it doesn't come from formality. It comes from specificity. Anything true about that one person will land, and anything generic will slide off a room no matter how beautifully it's done.

Legacy is not a folder

People often use legacy to mean the estate. What gets divided, who gets the ring, whether the cottage causes a fight or if there is name put on a building.

But ask anyone what they actually carry from their grandmother and you'll get something else entirely. A phrase they say now without thinking. The way they salt a pot of water. A standard about how to treat people that they've never once said out loud but organized their life around. Legacy is story. It moves through the living, and it dilutes fast if nobody says it on purpose.

The question underneath all of it stays the same. Not what happened to them at the end. How did they live, and what of that did they leave behind and what of are you keeping with you now. Answer that out loud, often, to anyone who'll listen. That's the whole practice. That’s their legacy.