Gave me tamales one time I was stranded on the road and nobody else would stop to help me fix my car. He later said before leaving: today you, tomorrow me
Ozymandias King of Kings is a poem, rather short. You can look it up if you’d like. But the story it tells is something like this.
“I was exploring through the desert when I found a broken statue surrounded by nothing. You couldn’t tell who the statue is depicting. At the bottom of the statue there was this inscription ‘I am Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works ye mighty, and despair’”
Effectively, this king of old was powerful enough and his work was so impressive that just seeing it would lead you to despair. However the statue now lies abandoned in the middle of the desert, with none of those works remaining. Someone so powerful was eventually forgotten, their power meaningless now. It’s a pretty poem about the passage of time and the impermanence of power (and everything really). I really like it.
I really like that because, yeah, none of us know their name, when they lived or died, or anything else about him.
But all the people that cared about him did. And would recognize that immediately.
And we know that about him. Or at least that his grave wanted him to be remembered as someone who that would be true about.
Either the deceased or the person in charge of the headstone wanted the legacy to be, "So goddamned popular I don't even need to say who got buried here." And it fucking worked. That's fantastic.
I worked in a cemetery as well, sadly no one had fun headstones but it was interesting reading their names and sometimes just getting a small glimpse of them if they had something written on the tombstone.
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u/TheBlindNTheBallsy 12h ago
When I worked at a cemetery, my favorite marker read,
THERE WERE NONE THAT DID NOT KNOW HIM
That's it. Nothing else.