I live in a small town with a monthly newsletter delivered in our mailbox, as a hard copy. Of course there is an electronic version on the website but I get the hardcopy in my mail box and I like to leaf through it. On the second to last page there is an article that is written by a retired writer who enjoys contributing to this free newsletter. She picks her themes and writes what pleases her. It is refreshing. One such article was about the author’s favorite thing to read in a newspaper: obituaries. She was confessing that she was not inclined to write about her interest in obituaries until her daughter prompted her.
Before reading her article I had a tendency to take a furtive look at obituaries, feeling guilty that I am not in there and there are so many people who lost loved ones and are mourning their loss. But she changed that for me. Since I read her article I started looking for the obituaries in every publication I find coming across my desk or desktop.
One day I picked up an old issue of the Civil Engineering magazine which was at the top of the stacked magazines I saved to read later. I flipped through to select a couple of articles to read when on page 77 of 80 I found the obituaries. I was surprised and picked another issue to see if it also had obituaries but that did not have it. The point is that the one random issue of a technical periodic I picked up did have obituaries, an entire page of them. The first person listed was Stephen D. Bechtel Jr. Dist. M. ASCE. THE Bechtel whose firm is well known world wide for extraordinary projects. I worked on one of the projects led by Bechtel: The Silver Line Phase I, where I had the chance to learn about the Bechtel culture and liked it. Reading about the accomplishments of a man who was a titan of my profession gave me wings.
Mr. Bechtel had a long list of accomplishments but I immediately zeroed in on the fact that he supported the creation of “Dream Big”, the single largest gift in the history of the ASCE organization. It is a good movie that I watched a few times along the years and inspired my friends to watch it too. Maybe I liked it so much because I am an engineer, so you may not like it but I do suggest that you find a copy and give it a shot. There is more than engineering in the movie.
I kept on reading and I realized that the message captured in less than 500 words was more powerful that the entire magazine for me in that moment. Reading the page was humbling and inspiring. It was sweet and reassuring. Reassuring that what we do matter.
I now make it a point to look for the obituaries and learn from them as much as I can. I learn mostly what life may be about: the things we do for ourselves and for other people selflessly as if they did not matter but do matter. We do them because we like doing them not because they matter. And we should keep doing them even if nobody seems to notice now but we notice and we know that we are making a difference. If it gets noticed later it may no longer matter for us but darn! We did make a difference and we did matter.
I will keep doing what I do, and work on doing it better every day, because everything matters to someone now and it will matter to someone else some day. And that matters. A lot.
The Full Person 