What Will You Leave Behind?

- Chad Merchant

A few weeks ago, I was wandering around a mall in Bangkok while on a weekend getaway. As I was looking at some expressionist paintings on exhibit – you know, pretending to be all hip and cultured – I noticed the background music. The tune (‘I Won’t Last a Day Without You’) was a 1974 hit from The Carpenters, and it had probably been at least 20 years since I had last heard it. Later, with the sweet vocals from Karen Carpenter still echoing in my head, I thought – as surely many do when hearing her singing – about her untimely death at just 32. Then that got me to thinking about how much in the broader world of entertainment we enjoy today has been performed or created by people who have by now departed this life. Books, music, poetry, movies, TV, even art – the work lives on.

For people who write or sing or act for a living, their legacy is one which is easy to identify. Most of us have likely even watched a movie in the last few months featuring cast members who are no longer living. Kids are still reading Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville in school, aspiring playwrights are looking back through the centuries to the genius of William Shakespeare, and jazz singers are listening to and being influenced by the inimitable vocal stylings of Billie Holiday, yet another legendary singer who died too young.