As we get older, we may find ourselves occasionally reflecting on how something of ourselves may live on when we are gone. This is not a macabre question, or one that needs to cause us angst. It is rather a beautiful and potentially reassuring one.
I am not referring to the immortality of the soul. Rather, I am thinking of the various ways in which each of us may live on in this world when our race has been run. If that seems hard to grasp, we need only observe how our own parents, and others who were close to us, continue to be part of our lives.
Something of us may, of course, survive in any children we are lucky enough to have. As Shakespeare observed: “This were to be new made when thou art old/And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.”
However, it is not only the fact of having descendants that may permit us, up to a point, to cheat the Grim Reaper. It is also the many ways in which our children and their offspring continue to reflect something of ourselves – in their appearance, character and mannerisms.
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This month, on holiday in Connemara, I am reminded every day of the holidays we spent there with our parents
We are often reminded of this by the things people say to us about our own forebears. “You’re the spit of your dad.” “You remind me of your mother.” “God, you’re like your Uncle Phil!” Our own children, throughout their lives, are likely to become accustomed to similar comparisons.
We have every prospect of living on in other ways, too, notably in the memories of the living. Something of our essence survives when we are remembered by our family and friends, and by others whose lives were touched by ours in one way or another. This month, on holiday in Connemara, I am reminded every day of the holidays we spent there with our parents, the games we played on the beach, the occasionally rain-drenched picnics, our evening get-togethers. The younger members of our own families will hopefully retain, for many decades to come, similar memories of Connemara in 2022.
Important also, of course, are the many stories we spin from the rich yarn of memory.
An image, a physical image, of us will also live on. There will be no shortage of photographs: in albums, on phones, in the iCloud, on fridges, hidden away in chests of drawers and framed on walls. More so than was the case for previous generations, there will also be plenty video clips. The pictures of us may not be looked at every day or even every month, but they will sometimes be glanced at on a wall, sought out on an anniversary or come across by chance.
Naming children
The naming of children can also have a powerful impact. My mother’s name, Róisín, already lives on in the family over several subsequent generations. I share my father’s name, as does one of his great grandchildren.
Some people remain with us through their artwork. I have a few amateur paintings by my mother that often remind me of her.
“The moving finger writes,” Omar Khayyam tells us, and nothing we do can “cancel half a line of it”. What we write also has the potential to survive the test of time. Shakespeare proclaims that his sonnets, as well as the person they are addressed to, need never fall victim to Time’s cruel scythe: “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see/So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”
It has recently struck me forcibly how many of my father’s phrases have become part of my own daily vocabulary
Great writers achieve a sort of immortality. Indeed, any published author lives on in their work, at least for a time. But even the more mundane things we commit to paper can have an afterlife. Accounts of family history, for example, even snippets, are greatly valued when their authors are no longer around to tell their tale in person. Long-lost letters or other writings may continue to touch the hearts of generations yet to come.
It has recently struck me forcibly how many of my father’s phrases have become part of my own daily vocabulary. For example, whenever one of my children had some success, my father used to say unfailingly: “It skips a generation.” I use this and many of his other casual phrases every day. When I do, I think of him; and his words still make other people smile.
Padraic Colum captured, in one of his poems, how the words we use can sometimes, after many years, unbeknown to us, find a new life in the mouths of others: “Years hence, in rustic speech, a phrase.”
And, of course, we can live on in the way we helped, in small or bigger ways, to shape our world, for those around us as well as for those who come after us.
Bobby McDonagh is a former ambassador to London, Rome and Brussels.