[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.