What if we were to write our own obituary? And what if we were to think of ourselves as we wrote this, not as the older person we were, but as the younger person we are, (“I’m younger than that now”)? What would we say? What would our younger self say about us in our own obituary column?
Would it speak about politics and how seriously we invested ourselves in the political system? Would we care who won what? Would it matter?
Would we care about how people defined us? Would it matter what others thought? Would we care about our reputation?
Would it matter how smart we were? Or how dumb? Would it be important that we were always thought of as someone with all the answers — or at least most of them?
With the world so complicated, would we have been someone who made everything simple — so black and white? Would people have come to us because we could simplify everything?
Or would we wish we had been more playful and not taken ourselves so seriously? Would we wish we had had more fun?
If we wrote our own obituary, as someone younger than that now, what would we write? How would you want to the remembered?
John Fischer The Catch 
As asked: “How would you want to the remembered?” As a good Sunday School teacher, Dr. David Dersch once taught & i liked it! I wanted to be remembered as a friend of God!
Mark, I say amen to ‘the friend of God’. Other than that i do not need to be remembered. When my Dad died he had been in an Alzheimer ward for 4 years. When I gave the eulogy, I noticed how few people were in the audience. Upon reflection, most of his friends were dead and basically close family was at the funeral. The longer you live the less people on earth remember you.
All I really want is for God to know that I tried to finish strong in my faith, accomplished what He wanted me to do and to forgive every sin I committed. Hopefully my family remembers me, but it is more important that they copy my faithfulness to God.
My Dad has been in heaven for 23 years, and I remember very little of what he did. HE had an incredible faith in God, like his dad, so that is what i want .
Yes. That’s the most important. “Copy my faithfulness to God.” I like that.
Sports writer, Jonathan Tjarks, died at 34 from cancer in the summer of 2022.
While undergoing treatments he had plenty of time to reflect on his life, both his past and his potential futures whether short or long.
Here are excerpts from one of his last published articles (March 3, 2022):
“Does My Son Know You?”
Being diagnosed with terminal cancer doesn’t happen like it does in the movies. The doctors don’t actually tell you how long you have to live. They can’t predict the future. What they say is: What you have will kill you at some point. We just don’t know when. It could be months. It could be years. It could be longer.
The only real hope they can offer is that someone might find a cure before it’s too late. All they can do for now is keep me alive as long as they can.
That means a lot of chemo and a lot of scans. My current schedule is chemo every three weeks and scans every nine. The whole process of getting scanned takes about an hour and a half. One hour to sit in the tiny waiting room and another half-hour for the actual scan.
It leaves you with a lot of time to think. I usually end up thinking about my son.
His name is Jackson. He’s now almost 2, which is a really fun age. We can communicate with him. He learns a new word almost every day.
Being a dad has been the greatest joy of my life.
~
My dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease when I was 6.
[He] went from needing a cane to walk to a back brace and then a walker and finally a wheelchair. Things really went south after he had open heart surgery. His body never recovered. He had to take so much medicine that it became hard to talk. He was there but he was no longer there.
I was 12.
That’s the age when your parents go from authority figures to actual people. That never happened for me and my dad. We never got to know each other. What did he like doing? What were his experiences growing up? What were his goals in life?
And there’s the simpler stuff too. How do you tie a tie? Or grill a burger? Or fix a car?
I had to figure it all out on my own. Now it looks like my son might have to do the same. It was the one thing that I never wanted for him.
~
Everyone was supportive at first. They brought us food, drove [my dad] places, and got him in and out of the car. But those visits slowly dried up over time. My dad kept getting sicker and could no longer do the things that had made them friends in the first place. People moved, or had kids, or got busy at work. Even the Christmas cards stopped coming. By the end, the only people who stopped by the house were nurses and health care workers.
My dad died when I was 21. There were a bunch of people at his funeral whom I hadn’t seen in years. They all told me how sorry they were and asked whether there was anything they could do. All I could think was I don’t know any of you. I know of you. I’ve heard your names. But I don’t know you.
The lie that society tells us is that our friends can be our family.
We can all leave our hometowns behind and have exciting adventures in the big city with people that we meet. And those people will love us and take care of us and be there for us.
Americans tend to put our careers first and move around the country. That’s what my parents did. My dad was from Nebraska. My mom is from the Philippines. I grew up in Dallas.
My parents tried to form a community where they lived, but they didn’t really have one. Not one that lasted.
~
I was nervous the first time I went to a life group. I’d joined a church the week before and one of the pastors, a guy a few years older than me, invited me. It was a smaller group of people who met at his house every week.
I remember walking up to the door and not knowing what to expect on the other side. There were about a dozen people in the living room talking to each other. I didn’t know any of them besides the pastor—and I barely knew him. I didn’t know what to do, so I did what most people would do: I headed over to the table with snacks.
Eventually the chatter died down and everyone sat in a circle in the living room. They all introduced themselves with an icebreaker. Something about their favorite TV show or their favorite snack. I was thinking, either I’m supposed to say I’m an alcoholic or this is a cult.
But nothing that exciting happened. They sang a few songs and then talked about the Bible for a while. At the end of the meeting, everyone paired off to pray for each other and the pastor asked me what I thought of the group. Then he asked if I would come back. I said I guess, but I wasn’t sure.
That was seven years ago.
The past two years haven’t been easy. Our life group met over Zoom for a while. People ask me whether I have to be more careful because of my condition and the pandemic. But it’s really the opposite. I don’t have the luxury of waiting for life to get back to normal. This might be the only time that I have.
Life group is a different kind of insurance. People talk a lot about medical insurance and life insurance when you get sick. But relational insurance is far more important. I didn’t need my dad’s money, but I could have used some of his friends.
~
I wish I could say that getting diagnosed with cancer has brought me closer to God. That my faith is stronger than ever before and that it has comforted me through these tough times. I have read plenty of stories like that. But that’s not really how it has worked for me.
I want to believe in a miracle. There have been people with stage IV sarcomas whose tumors never came back. No one knows why. Some things are still beyond the knowledge of medical science. I asked my doctor if I could be one of those people. He replied, “I am not the one who decides those things.”
I believe in a God who does. But I also know that He has chosen not to heal me. At least not yet. And that hurts.
The only thing I can say is that there was never a promise that it would be any other way.
There are some things from the Bible that I have been leaning on over the past year:
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this. To look after orphans and widows in their distress.” —James 1:27
“Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.” —Isaiah 1:17
“You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child.” —Exodus 22:22
There are hundreds of verses like that.
I have already told some of my friends: When I see you in heaven, there’s only one thing I’m going to ask—Were you good to my son and my wife? Were you there for them? Does my son know you?
I don’t want Jackson to have the same childhood that I did.
I want him to wonder why his dad’s friends always come over and shoot hoops with him. Why they always invite him to their houses. Why there are so many of them at his games. I hope that he gets sick of them.
One thing I have learned from this experience is that you can’t worry about things that you can’t control. I can’t control what will happen to me. I don’t know how long I will be there for my son. All I can do is make the most of the time that I have left.
That means investing in other people so they can be there for him.
You can read the entire article “Does My Son Know You?” here:
https://www.theringer.com/2022/3/3/22956353/fatherhood-cancer-jonathan-tjarks