We all matter. RIL Rob Teina 10/08/26

I’ve been thinking a lot about legacy. Not the grand shiny, carved in stone kind. The other kind. The kind that lives in people after you’re gone. I’ve been to a lot of funerals lately. The older I get the more frequent flyer miles I seem to collect.

We can’t escape it so why the hekka don’t we talk about it. Why is talking about death so quickly met with~Oh stop being morbid It’s not morbid. It’s inevitable. Hell if we were a little more willing to talk about death while we’re alive, we might get a little better at talking about what it actually means to live.

We can dress it up in religion, spirituality, science, stories, ceremony, certainty. We can call it heaven, the spirit world, returning to the earth, becoming energy, becoming nothing.

The truth is none of us actually knows. I just know there is something. I’ve felt it. Seen things I can’t explain. Heard things I know I heard. Had moments where the veil between what I can understand and what I can only feel has seemed paperthin. So death itself doesn’t frighten me nearly as much as the thought of someone leaving this world alone.

That breaks something open in me.

The idea of a person taking their final breath here without someone they love holding their hand. Without hearing a familiar voice. Without knowing they mattered. The hardest part is knowing that sometimes there simply isn’t anyone left to stand beside them. The people they loved have already gone. The family has fractured. The friendships have disappeared. Time has done what time does. Eventually every single one of us becomes someone who was.

Today I went to the memorial of a man who was a bloody great human. Like really bloody great. He lived his life in a way that made people feel seen. One of his mottos was: Clap so loud for your people that they don’t hear who doesn’t.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that.

Because that there is the legacy.

Not the big shit nor the things we seem to have to accumulate. Neither do I think it’s a fucking impressive obituary. It’s the way people remember how they felt around you. It’s the person who says~They believed in me . The one who remembers that you showed up. The one who laughs so hard telling a story about you that they have to stop because they can’t get the words out. The one who still hears your laugh years later. The one who carries something you taught them into a life you will never get to see.

That to me is the strange magic of being human.

We leave pieces of ourselves everywhere. In people. In places. In songs. In recipes.

In photographs. In smells. In the way someone hugs their own child because you once showed them what tenderness looked like. In the courage someone finds because you told them they could. In the ridiculous saying they still use because you said it once and it stuck.

We think we disappear when we die. Perhaps we just become less concentrated. A little bit of us stays here. Scattered through the people we loved. And when eventually those people disappear too. The photographs fade. The names become less familiar. The stories lose their edges.

Someone who once knew exactly how your face looked when you laughed eventually becomes someone who only remembers that you laughed a lot. Eventually even that disappears. That thought could be terrifying. Somehow I find it beautiful.

Perhaps we were never meant to be permanent. Maybe the whole point was never to leave a monument. Perhaps the point was simply to leave something behind that was worth carrying.

Your legacy.

A little more love. A little more courage. A little more kindness. A little more fucking mischief.A reminder that someone once walked this earth and tried really fucking hard to be a good human.

I try to live with integrity. I don’t always nail it.

I’m human. I fuck up. I get angry. I judge. I say things I probably shouldn’t. Sometimes I’m an absolute snotty little bitch but underneath all of that I want to be someone who loves well.

Someone who sees the good in people. Someone who shows up. Someone who claps loudly for the people I love. Someone who makes another human being feel less alone in this strange beautiful, fucked up experience of being alive.

Because one day I will be the photograph on the table. Someone will stand in a room and talk about me in the past tense. There will be stories. There will probably be some wildly inappropriate ones. There will be laughter. There will be tears. Someone will say~She was fucking mad……I just know it. Someone else will say~Yeah but she loved ferociously hard.

I hope that somewhere amongst the flowers and photographs and grief there is someone who can honestly say: She made me feel like I mattered.

That would be enough for me. More than enough. I don’t need to be remembered forever. Forever is a fucking long time. I just want to have mattered while I was here.

When it’s my turn to leave, I want my people to clap so fucking loudly for the life I lived that wherever the fuck I’m going, I can hear them.

That’s the real legacy I think I’ve been grappling over.

Not that we were here but that for a little while, we made being here matter.