“You die the way you live.”

I think it is amazing, how we connect our childhood lives to our adult lives. I’ve been listening to Steve Burn’s podcast, you know, the Blue’s Clues guy? And he has a lot of guidance still. I think it’s funny that in a way the man who taught me my shapes is teaching me about how to navigate my 30’s in a way that feels accessible but also not judgemental. I don’t love every thought of course, a few of my edges have hardened since I was 3, but I do love the way he thinks and I think that’s something that was given to us as an extra bonus in a way. Space, the guy likes his space.

So when I was listening to the guy talk and he said those words, “you die the way you live” it actually brought me back to another mentor. One who I had in college. For my last semester of my second year of grad school, that’s right a three yearer here, I took some random art history class that was called “Roman Sarcophagi.” The man who taught the class would show up in a bow-tie, two packs of cookies in tow, and an enthusiasm that would make a power-ranger blush. His name is Mont Allen. And Dr. Allen, let’s give him a proper title, spelling, or neither, talked about Roman Sarcophagi. You might not see the connection yet but I assure you it exists.

Roman Sarcophagi taught me a lot about how narrow my view of the past was. I won’t bore or lecture but there is a lot to be said about connecting geography, writing, and myth. What I learned was that ancient Romans were not very different from modern anythings. The city dwellers wished for a simplistic bucolic life and yet rurality eventually drew people to the booming centers of life. And at the center of that life were dead people. Sarcophagi were adorned with stories larger than life, they showed stories of grand feats, love and death, sea like motifs, and they served as a reminder of an inevitability. Life ends, everyone you love dies, but just like everything in life it’s in the way that you use it. People would invest in their death tombs and stories that they left behind, often having their own likeness carved into the faces of the heroes of the stories that would be told and, in that way, we can learn about who they were. These monoliths were every day occurrences, they were part of ritual and celebration, the dead were asked to join in the lives of the living in this way. Until they were moved deeply outside of towns and we forgot how to live with death.

I urge you to read into Mr. Allen’s work and what he concludes and delivers because the only thing I can offer is an echo of the classes and time I spent talking to him. But from what I could gleam, there is plenty to see in the faces and the stories told on the sides of those glorious corpse eaters.

The stories we leave behind decide how we will be remembered. It is no small thing, carrying on someone’s legacy. But the truth is that it is carved in stone here. Who were you in life, that you would invest in a tale after your death, and more so why that tale, why there? It all comes to intent, it has meaning, it is art because of that. Someone proud of their wealth will depict all of their possessions, knowledge includes the scroll and scribe of the writer, a warrior perhaps will carry on in battle in their death with an army at their back. And we’re here some thousand or two years later still considering these names and actions, and we think about them as people who had something to say.

Today we have eulogies. We have wakes. We have pissing contests outside of the bar where they would regularly stake their claim to glory with fists and blood. It is more subtle, but, we still tell our stories when we pass. The Romans looked to death as an unwakeable sleep in which you move from one state of consciousness into unconsciousness and endless dreams. In those endless dreams the moons and sun pass by unable to stir even a thought as the soul slumbers in its next form of life. Not true for all but enough that it seems to hold up. I think it is most commonly similar to how we say “They’re sleeping” to one another in a true sort of comfort. Now their work is done.

Without the poetry and the romance, the words carefully laid out, the intent left behind, what does it mean? I think it has been very simple. The things that you surround yourself with in life will follow you to the grave. It’s not hard to follow that. If you invest in family, that’s who will bury you. If you chase wealth, your money will lay your head to rest. Luxury, imbibe, risk will all accompany you much longer than any living memory. So what you lay in stone, will lay you in stone. So tell your stories to the living, carve your tales while you’re alive, pick the plot where your body lays.

Remember you can never wake up to the sunrise again, one day. You can never rest your head against the warmth of the sun, one day. But every day you can, write how you would like to through your actions and through your words. The world does not tell your story, the things closest to you do.