In his poem ‘So Many Lengths of Time’, Brian Patten suggests that ‘a man lives for as long as we carry him inside us’, and that certainly strikes a chord with me. So often, as I grow older, I open my mouth and my father’s sayings fall out. We cannot die as long as there are people on earth who remember us.
I was just talking to someone about this idea--that we die twice, the second being when the last person who knew us dies. I've been thinking about this for a while.
