[Mantipath]

In life it's easy to be uninterested in your Dad's thousand-hour audio archive of him presiding over the Civic Plumbing Council of Akron, Ohio.

Listening to that while he's alive would be a waste of your irreplaceable shared time on Earth, right? It's just his job. While your Dad is alive you should go talk to him on subjects he cares about.

After he dies, though, if there happens to be an archive of your father joking around with, remonstrating, and otherwise being himself with the people who made up half of the social context for his waking life, year after year, that might be valuable to you.

It only has value in the right emotional context, of course, perhaps when you reach the age he was when the recordings were made. You can measure your daily self against the daily self your father created and inhabited.

An existential crisis might create a desire for that comparison, or perhaps you'll find yourself missing him and realize that family records don't show who he was in the world at large.

If your father is careless with that information you don't have that opportunity. If you are careless with your equivalent of that information your heirs won't have that opportunity.

[pasabagi]

As somebody who spent wholly too much time on the dead, honestly, it's not worth it. Poring through old things gives you a thin kind of happiness, but prolongs your grief. When people die, information is inevitably lost - an awful lot of it. The real loss is that what they leave behind, including your memories, are very shallow in comparison to who they were. Trying to make up for essential shallowness by just collecting more data is like trying to quench your thirst by drinking spit.

When I die, I hope I am forgotten - because honestly, grief is shit, and the dead neither appreciate it, nor wanted it before they died. People can't be measured, and their lasting forms aren't them in any case - they are just text, video, photographs.

[fsloth]

"When I die, I hope I am forgotten"

On the other hand, now, that's bleak.

I would view that human relationships are like strings that connect human beings. Grief of loss is the process of cutting those strings - one-by-one - and it hurts like hell. Because, if the relationship was an important one - I think it's supposed to. And after the grief has done it's job the living move on.

After the grief has done it's job, memories become bitter sweet. There are always complications, of course, and for example unresolved issues make it difficult to let go.

We begin to die the day we are born. It's only a matter of time, really. All of us are mortally ill of a condition called life. Every precious relationship must end in time.

There is a zen-story about this. A wise man was asked what was happiness? He answered, a man is born, a son is born, a grandson is born. Man dies, son dies, grandson dies. It sounds horrible the first time you hear it, but then you realize it nailed it completely - any other order would be worse, and having no children would be even sadder.

[DoreenMichele]

"When I die, I hope I am forgotten" On the other hand, now, that's bleak.

My mother has always said "Funerals are for the living, not the dead." I don't find the GPs attitude bleak at all. The people who grieve most heavily seem to be those with unfinished business with the deceased. If you leave behind no unfinished business, I think people can let it go fairly easily. They got what they needed while you were alive. That's a good deal.

[mantas]

There's a huge difference between forgetting and letting go though.

[cableshaft]

We have very different viewpoints. I'm a creative person. I have worked on many things that haven't been successful (and some of which have) but people I know might find them interesting and entertaining (Stories, novel attempts, video games, board games, music, videos, etc).

I'd rather a decent amount of those survive me in some fashion. A few might, as they'll probably be included in console or flash game rom dump collections, but I wish more would. I also wish i completed more projects in my lifetime.

[pasabagi]

Realistically, if a project is unfinished, is it interesting? My feeling is that I don't finish creative projects because they have some kind of fundamental dysfunction or problem. If a creative project failed to keep my attention to the bitter end, then I don't think it would be keeping the attention of my descendants on its own merits.

I've experienced the other side of this one - a lot of my family were amateur artists. Their work, on the whole, isn't that interesting. Their practice, on the other hand, is something they passed on, and I value it quite a lot. As a kid, I was always encouraged to make things, and to make new things rather than replicas, and to take making things seriously.

I still make a lot of stuff, and I really feel that people who don't are missing out - but I don't think I've made anything that I'd like my descendants to have - other than the practice of making things itself. I guess family, at its best, is about passing on traditions that allows you to live well in a frankly hard and troubling world. I mean, you can pass on more stuff than that - paintings, photos - but it usually ends up sitting in some attic. At least, that's what's happened to the creative output of about four generations of my family.

[andyjohnson0]

I agree. An old friend of mine died last year, and I recently discovered a youtube video of her speaking at an academic conference. The subject doesn't interest me, and while she was alive I wouldn't have even bothered to search for videos much less watch it. But now she's dead it is the only record I have of what her voice sounded like, how she expressed herself. So I downloaded a copy to keep and although it's unlikely I'll watch it again, it is some tiny comfort. Context changes the value of these things.