Of all the fatuous things said about the pleasures of being well off, the most stupid by far is, "He who dies with the most toys wins." This is so embedded in our culture that it was even used in a recent TV commercial.
The idea that as your body is taken off to the funeral home, you can posthumously smile to yourself because there is a luxury car in front of your mansion seems to be the ultimate comment on having an endless lust for things, even as death has closed the book on our lives.
The really important priorities of life were pointed out to my wife and me recently when we got a call from California from a daughter of a friend who had died. This call was a great surprise to us, because we had not lived in California for about 20 years. The man who passed away had worked with my wife, and I had met him several times.
Because Joe was divorced and lonely, my wife had often talked to him at work. One peculiarity of her co-worker, she remembered, was that he took the same contents in his lunch bag every day. He was an introverted man, but my wife was kind to him and talked to him often even when others in the office did not.
After we left California, my wife continued to keep in touch by writing to him. These were not e-mails, but real paper letters. Eventually, after she no longer got replies from him, she stopped writing.
We sometimes do not really know what impressions we make on people. My guess is that Joe's friendship with my wife meant more to him than we calculated. Although we did not ask his daughter directly, I wondered if Joe might even have kept some of those letters, thereby sparking the call to us.
The idea that we do not really know what effect we have on others was driven home to me when a former student of mine drove 200 miles round-trip from Chicago to Purdue University simply to seek career advice when I was working at Purdue. When I was teaching journalism at a college near Chicago, I always included in my journalism courses some practical tips on how to plan a career. However, I had little idea of how important this was until the student drove all the way down to have me expand on my advice.
Similarly, I once wrote some birthday congratulations to the mother of a friend of mine. I forgot what I wrote to her, but she must have fancied it, because after she died, my friend found that note among her belongings. The only word I could find at the time he told me this was that I was honored that this literate, intelligent woman had chosen to keep something I had sent to her.
So, what is the definition of "rich"? And how many toys do we all need to validate our lives?
Should we mark the successes in our lives by the square footage of our homes, or should we feel, instead, that we are both successful and rich if we have marked other's lives in some positive, and perhaps enduring, way?
In the end, we really can't take those material possessions with us. But perhaps we can live on in some people's minds as having made some difference in an indifferent world.
- Douglas Spangler, a writer and former university administrator, lives in Palm Harbor.
