how he wished to be remembered

Another Yom Kippur and having my soul put through the wringer, one of many themes chiming within, the day after: Life is evanescent and fleeting, our days like fugitive clouds, we realize the 'charged emptiness' in the words of my late friend and Rabbi Alan Lew.

At the center of our being is

"................"

Thanks to fellow blogger Louise Julig for jumpstarting this post:
Not that we know what to do with death, but what are we to do with our life?

During a morning bike ride one weekend near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco
I noticed some 20 or 30 people gathered along a strip of parking lot next to the ocean. A woman with a megaphone was standing next to a picture of a bearded man in a baseball cap. The beach was the backdrop for an impromptu memorial service that makes living in this city such a human experience. One of the women, who knew this guy 'Bob,' was trying to recreate, in snippets, how he lived, how he was always full of love. Some of these people knew him, though most of the crowd, I believe, were curious onlookers like me, and had never met him.

I think the guy would have appreciated the people who were pouring out their souls as if the loss would not be contained. Two friends who I considered close passed away; one's death sudden, the other from lingering cancer.
Both knew their life's work was to be engaged in repairing the world, doing it in their own different way.

In the end, when there wasn't anything that could save them, they were wayfarers, we are, just like Bob, part of an extended, extended variegated family.

Before I left, having heard how Bob enriched the lives of countless friends, I heard a woman describe him as 'a professor of love.'

I thought, this is how I would like to be remembered: As practitioner of acts of lovingkindness. This guy Bob may have known, seen, hour at hand, the Angel of Death holding his name on a scroll, as it will, but I'm pretty sure he would not fall to regretting life's indecision, or, cry, pleading, as Moses did, with wrenching emotion, pleaded to the One who reprieves yet would not grant this last one.

 I would like to think Bob had gone this way from this good life.

For all the fear that we will die, we get to 'live,' here and now, in others.
Love binds us, and if there is an afterlife, a friend's extolling a life that touched others completes the soul's encounter with this world.

Love is, after all, a renouncement of the physical, that temporary embrace with our world.