What will our children and grandchildren remember us?

I didn't deliberately think about the heavy topic of death, because I accidentally watched the play "Miracle of the Heart" on the treadmill. Because I only watched a third of it, I am not sure whether the main theme of this drama is life or death, but the biggest touch that this half hour brought to me was: thinking about death.

The protagonist of the plot, a middle-aged man who has just captured the shadow of his dream, is so happy that he fell into the well and became a soul to come to the place of birth, that is, the place before the reincarnation of man. There, he watched his life and saw himself lying in a hospital bed at the end of his life depressed and broken: My life is meaningless, I can't accept it, I can't just die like this.

Seeing this paragraph, I suddenly thought, if I were him, what kind of epitaph should I use to summarize such a life. If it were me, I would like to write something on my epitaph a hundred years from now. After thinking about it for a long time, I found a very cruel but had to accept fact: most ordinary people do not have any epitaphs. Their lives are like shooting stars across the sky, short and silent. For example, my grandmother.

Just last month, my grandmother passed away, and in a month's time she will be 90 years old, but she left us forever. She left quickly, from sudden to departure in only half a month. Due to the epidemic, her funeral was also very simple, my father and his siblings brought grandma's ashes back to their hometown and put them together with grandpa. The only names on the tombstones are the name of the grandmother, the time of birth to death, and the names of the children and grandchildren of the family.

There is no epitaph, and even the memory of my grandmother is only in my generation, because I had my grandmother and her love in my childhood, so I still remember my grandmother, but I can no longer go with my child to introduce her, I can only tell him that he is the person my mother loves the most, and give my mother a lot of love. As time went on, I thought that one day my memory of my grandmother might only be the word "grandma."

There are not many deep memories that can withstand the wear and tear of time, and ordinary people's lives are not thick enough to leave an epitaph and be remembered by the world, for example: Marilyn Monroe's epitaph with her three circumferences: 37, 22, 35, R.I.P;Hemingway's epitaph: Forgive me; Mark Twain: he observes the changes in the world, but tells the truth of the world; Rousseau's epitaph: Sleeping here is a man who loves nature and truth... Some write interestingly, some seriously, but in any case, this sentence is their life, so concise and appropriate.

And most ordinary people, the same length, can not be summed up in a sentence, a paragraph or a bunch of words, whether they are themselves or their relatives. They left as they went, so quietly.

We are so ordinary that we may not be able to afford a cemetery after death. We don't have a tomb, but we should have our own epitaph, a sentence that can be summarized and may define our own life, otherwise, we will be like the protagonist in the previous plot, when we look back on our lives, it is shame, regret, regret, is... I don't know, but I think a life without a plan is not worth remembering, and it can't stand to be remembered.

Thinking like this, it is indeed a bit pessimistic and heavy. Thinking about such a grand problem as an ordinary person will only make us feel more ordinary, after all, "the Great Wall is still there today, and I don't see the First Emperor of Qin", and I will wake up tomorrow and pinch the time to move bricks. However, life is like a blank piece of paper, if there is no planned scribble, in the end it is just a piece of waste paper, and only ashes are left after a fire.

Stephen Covey advocates beginning and ending in his book "Highly Effective People", arguing that if a person can consciously try to make an epitaph for his life, this life will be clearer, even if it is a simple sentence such as: I will not argue in my life", it is also a mission of faith.

As ordinary people, we do not have the luxury of flowing for hundreds of years, and we are on a par with the Great Wall, but we also hope to live up to the time and waste this life. When I get old many years later, I can at least say without regret: I have come, I have lived, and I have lived at every age. As an ordinary person, I can inspire my ordinary offspring and tell them that ordinary people can also live out their highlight moments, such as their grandmother, who insists on running and writing every day.