Immortality Reconsidered

Ernest Hemingway reportedly said, "Every man (sic) has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name."

Actually, I don't think that's the end. And I don't need to invoke reincarnation or any fancy theological concepts here. Last week, a close friend sent me a New York Times Guest Essay by Roger Rosenblatt, "The Love We Leave Behind." (7-13-2025, linked HERE)

In it, the 85-year-old essayist wrote lovingly of three long-standing friends, Jules Feiffer, Lance Morrow, and David Childs, all of whom had died in the preceding seven months. All had left behind significant professional legacies (cartoons and writing, essays, and architecture, respectively) that, ultimately, will crumble to dust and be forgotten. Now, they all live on in Rosenblatt's mind and his active memory.

Jules, Lance and David really happened, and I know this not because of their achievements on paper or of steel and pilings, but rather because of what I feel now, still, for my three friends. That feeling abides, and I shall bequeath it to others, to you among them, before I, too, become someone’s memory.

I fully concur. But let me expand on this a bit further.

Even beyond the death of Mr. Rosenblatt, being close to three such good friends has (I imagine) changed him in ways, perhaps imperceptibly, that will continue to have effects beyond all of their physical deaths and all memories of them as specific people.

He concluded his beautiful essay with Philip Larkin's words, "What will survive of us is love.”

I surmise that those close friendships changed all four of these men for the better. The abstract "love" survives, indeed. But that love is manifest through many subsequent seemingly mundane actions that will have ripple effects across many many generations.

The latter sentiment speaks to me, and it fits with my experience of important people who have touched my life and also passed on. Their love didn't stop with them and won’t stop with me. It has become incorporated into my karmic DNA (for lack of a better term) and shines forth when I interact with others. Then it becomes a part of those others, spreading the ripples out ever wider.

It also makes me think of the countless generations before me, whose karmic DNA was shaped by those going before them, into an infinte regress. As another friend reminds me frequently, "All life is connected."

Thank you, my friend, for sharing this article with me -- and now, with the world, through the vehicle of these words. It's a comforting meditation for those of us whose mortality seems increasingly real.