Dec. 9, 2024. The world received notice that Jimmy Carter, America’s 39th and longest living president, had passed away. 

Reverence, respect, and discussion were dolled out where it was due, and Carter’s political vision became the topic of dissertations, his life summarized and significance resuscitated into the lungs of society for another few days. 

Regardless of political alignment, it seemed almost natural to defer to the respect and life of a veteran, of a president, of a human being. 

Though it sounds insensitive, this was almost an odd stance in the backdrop of the narrative told in this world. In a globe revolving around a sun we all fly too close to, we politize all. That of destruction, of death. Of fires and disease and hurting.

It seemed appropriate then, to wonder not why, but how, this death could be perceived so differently.

Death is as constant as life is as constant as ridicule. Humans can exist in a most exquisitely tragic duality; we insist on a fundament of decency in death, and then polarize life. Cynicism is not the goal, here, however. 

Rather, the question can be drawn: How does death impact the legacy of the gone to the living?

“If you say that an artist died, you are going to remember them as they live for their music, but when they die, people are always shifting their views,” Keron Bowman (11) said of our perception of celebrity passing. “(Celebrities) should be treated with respect when they are alive. They are human beings.”

Louis Stoyanov (11) perceives our societal response to public death as arguably more straight-forward. “Nobody likes to look at a dead man and laugh,” Stoyanov said.

Our advantage as those who remain is the capacity to perceive an individual who is now stationary. We can judge however we choose, as only we have say in this climate.

Stoyanov (11) says of this phenomenon, “No one who is dead is now able to apologize.”

Celebrities who have passed are now more intangible, while simultaneously digestible. Their life, in their time, can and will be interpreted innumerable ways in worlds and generations that would never cross their path. 

Loukya Vaka (11) explains history’s attention span precisely: ““Perhaps, it could be argued, people move too quickly to the next living notable personality after a different life can no longer be recorded for all to see,” Vaka said.

Mortality makes martyrs when perspective evolves. Death leaves a shadow of legacy with more depth than the discombobulated light of life. Hindsight provides a sense of moral superiority to those who were privileged with distance. 

History becomes rewritten when those in power are handed a pen. The social consensus shifts, and what was once unfavorable now is seen in a different light. 

Those ridiculed now immortalized in the hopes that we would not, ourselves, spite them in our time. Progress itself is measured by the agenda of a people, and disputed to the point of intangibility. 

Thus, our world, in all its calamity, seems slow to change in a meaningful way. We find ourselves caught in an unintentional equilibrium of two extremes. 

Still, we let down our heroes. We console in the fact that it wasn’t we who let down the heroes of whom we are aware, due only to years of distance.

Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a world he would never die in. 

Mahatma Gandhi died at the hands of the violence he spoke out against.

Thousands pass a day with apologies unsaid and songs unsung.

We build our martyrs upon pedestals we so graciously adore to crumble, then repurpose the loose stone for their graves.  A descent made beautiful by its height. Unconsciously yet patient, respect paints a sentiment for they who we never did know. 

But this is not irony. This is not an epitaph for the hope of the human race. Our impact surpasses us, and our temporary voyage is disproportionately short and inconceivably wide. 

Within the time we spend living, we complain, and tweet, and conflate, and obfuscate. We adore, and love, and change, and listen. We live and we die.

A trillion eyes are upon those who are public unto the world, and a trillion mouths speak and hush. Whether or not legacy is accentuated by the reminder of our mortality, to have legacy at all is to have lived.

“Better” or “worse” are at the hands of those with whom we will never speak in this life. We live and die with our worst and our best.

Let us live when we live and rest when we rest.

Even statues crumble in the end.