TIME OUT: What would you say about the life you've lived?
IF YOU could leave one idea, one message, one single sentence for others at the end of your life, what would it be? What would you say? Would you summarise your personal existence, make an abstract commentary on life itself, provide an axiom for living or a statement about life after death? What emotion would you wish your last words to evoke? Would you prefer to write them yourself or have others write them about you? In summary, what decisions, if any, have you made about your epitaph? Because the epitaph we choose says much about the life we have lived.
The epitaph is the final statement: the parting word. In that it is powerful. It may be as sparse as the names and dates of entry and exit from the world. It may be as extensive as commentary, comfort, admonishment, reflection, instruction or advice on how to live life. It may be poetic or prosaic, imaginative, elegiac or inspirational. But whatever it is, it is a communication to those who read it.
Psychologically we may avoid thinking about death, but as decades go by, it is of note that those who prepare by making wills, deciding about funerals by selecting headstones and epitaphs, often find that they enjoy life more fully than those who do not wish to consider their mortality until it confronts them.
Like insurance that is not required because it has been obtained, preparation dismantles anxiety and removes the need to think about one’s demise because the details around it have been decided. Families are spared speculation about wishes. It is easier for them to know what the person they love wants after death.
But, more importantly, thinking about one’s epitaph provides a unique insight into what is most precious in life, what we want to be remembered for, and by whom, and what we might need to do now to achieve that.
From the psychological perspective, epitaphs provide information. Most striking is the degree of epitaph humour bequeathed by the departed. A veritable joke book of tombstone humour is ascribed to professions: the auctioneer whose epitaph was “Going, going, gone”, the lawyer whose read “The defence rests”, the waiter whose inscription read, “God finally caught his eye” and the gardener over whose grave was written “Don’t walk on the grass”.
What makes such epitaphs so psychologically engaging is how descriptive, ironic, quirky, and starkly funny many choose their final pronouncements to be. Think of Spike Milligan whose final quip, “I told you I was ill”, reminds us of his wry delight in the outrageous, embodied in this parting headstone jibe. And in the light of Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle” the epitaph “He lies here somewhere” can but bring a smile, as does the riddle of Christopher Wren’s in St Paul’s Cathedral, of which he was the architect, that if you seek his monument, “look around you” .
But epitaphs may also shock us with their poignancy. The gravestone which contains the number the deceased was given in Auschwitz requires no further words. Who could not be moved by the dead soldiers’ request that, “When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow we gave our today”? No witticism was chosen for Oscar Wilde’s tomb but a piece from his Ballad Of Reading Gaol: “And alien tears will fill for him, pity’s long broken urn, for his mourners will be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.”
If the tombstone is a reminder of mortality, of the shortness of life and the inevitability of death, what is written upon it is an additional statement about the person who has died. In the epitaph we make a final declaration about who and what we are, what we believed, what we attempted to do in life, the relationships we enjoyed and the meaning our death has for others. Perhaps this is why so many are content with the description “beloved” for at the end of the day to be “loving and much loved” may supersede all other accomplishments.
Marie Murray is a clinical psychologist and author. Her weekly radio slot,
Mindtime
, is on
Drivetime
on Wednesdays on RTÉ Radio One