Issue #109: Dead, forgotten

May 19, 2021 truereview 0

Dead, forgotten

I don’t want to live, die and be completely forgotten. Unfortunately, many souls are.

I am reminded of bard William Shakespeare when he wrote his Sonnet No. 18.

Within the sonnet, Shakespeare perhaps is writing about how precious and everlasting his love for a woman might have been. Maybe. Perhaps.

More likely, he is writing that this sonnet itself can outlast everything. Things will pass; people will die; empires will crumble; but his own sonnet remains, reprinted and reread, year after year.

I was able to encapsulate my life and career in my book, published by Bookstand Publishing in December 2020, called DEEMED NONESSENTIAL. It’s a biography about my career in the newspaper industry and why the industry is crumbling.

It’s a sonnet to a field I fell in love with in 1976 and remains a big part of my life 40-plus years later.

I am not sure I impart much hope in the book. I feel terribly sorry for young journalists. Will they have careers – can they have careers – in a field that is hanging on by its financial teeth?

I wanted to place my life in something permanent. The pandemic allowed time to do so.

Things will pass. I will pass. But my book remains: And this gives life to thee.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
— William Shakespeare, Sonnet No. 18

With DEEMED NONESSENTIAL, I hope the work to preserve newspaper publishing will continue long after I am gone.