Leave No Spotless
If one day I die unexpectedly, I hope the secrets I kept in life—the parts of me that lived in shadow—will all be preserved, down to the last detail.
Years ago, there was a joke: if you get into a car accident, the first thing to do before the ambulance arrives is not to call the police, but to wipe your phone.
It is a dark joke steeped in adult humor. Browser history, chat logs, photo albums, notes—together, these things probably make up the most private corner of a person. At the edge of life and death, the first thought is apparently not what to leave behind, but how to destroy it all. It is like a secret agent in a film pressing the self-destruct button before their cover is blown, taking every secret with them.
I feel precisely the opposite.
I have few reservations about what happens after I die. You might even call my attitude a little irresponsible: after me, the flood. I will not care how others judge me, nor what they discover on my computer, my phone, or in my diaries.
If that day truly comes, I would rather everything about me remain.
Not so that I can become an object of study, of course, and not to satisfy anyone's voyeurism. I simply hope that what remains is a truer, fuller person—not an image polished over and over until only its bright side survives.
A person was never meant to be respectable in every respect.
Some worry that after they die, old accounts will be reopened and the career and reputation they spent a lifetime building will collapse overnight. Would that not make the whole effort a terrible bargain?
I have always found something ignoble in that way of thinking.
If a career or reputation was built on lies, disguise, or deliberate concealment, then the truth was always going to escape in the end. To have kept it intact for an entire lifetime was already an extraordinary kindness of fate. To reach the end and still demand that this respectability survive you—to leave generation after generation with a flawless likeness—is too greedy, and too absurd.
I do not believe in perfect people.
Given the choice between innocence and truth, I would rather leave the truth. Even if it contains shame, weakness, thoughts unfit for daylight, and many things that even today I might be unwilling to admit. Those things did not turn me into somebody else. They simply made me whole.
If misfortune finds me one day, I hope others will see not a carefully polished monument, but a person who truly existed.
And so I will leave no spotless name behind.