A man’s lasting impact is in the eye of the beholder

I am no better, and neither are you. We are the same in whatever we do.

— Sly & the Family Stone

The funeral was an elaborate affair, one befitting the legacy of the departed.

He’d become something of a local titan of industry, wealthy beyond most people’s capacity to imagine, his name known far and wide. There were those, yes, who called him names like “skinflint,” “tightwad” “Scrooge” and other similar sobriquets for those who refused to help the less fortunate. But most in the community gave him the respect of his position.

Several prominent people — many of them well-known in the state — spoke at the funeral service, lauding the departed for “pulling himself up by his bootstraps” and making himself a success. The community’s elite packed the sanctuary of the church that the late businessman had attended, and church officials made certain the occasion was one “befitting such an important man.”

Traffic in the community was held up for a lengthy period while a funeral procession several blocks long wound its way to the cemetery selected to be the great man’s final resting place. Most who attended the funeral service came to the gravesite to see the honoree off.

The local news media offered any number of special articles and features to pay fitting tribute to the departed. Local and state dignitaries were quoted, and the gist of most such tributes was that this community would most likely see few the likes of this man in coming years.

Local government officials talked of putting together some kind of suitable tribute to the great man; there remain ongoing discussions about some kind of “naming ceremony” that might pay suitable homage to the legacy of the great man.

Meanwhile …

Across town, in the parts of the city where residents usually lock themselves in their homes once the sun goes down and where the only people who concerned themselves with the community’s loss of the great man were those who worked for him, wondering if their jobs were safe, a man not well-known outside his neighborhood was laid to rest on the same day.

The man was not, by general standards, any kind of “prominent citizen.” He had a nice home that he kept in pristine condition, and he and his wife raised four children to be professionals, all college graduates who’d built successful careers and families. He did not donate funds to local charities — such would not fit in his budget — but he supported his church, and he volunteered to serve on his Neighborhood Watch group, and he helped coach youth sports teams while his kids were playing.

Friends described this humble citizen as a “giant, gentle man,” noting that he was “as devoted a family man as there is in the community.”

Friends and neighbors dropped by the departed’s home to bring food to the man’s wife and family members who came to town for the funeral, and many of the people who knew the man attended his funeral. Unlike the procession that came to honor the businessman, there was sparse attendance at this humble man’s funeral. His family and close neighbors were there, and so were a few of his co-workers and church members.

But it was a Saturday, and folks had things to do.

The services for these two men were as dissimilar as possible, and that’s one of the vagaries of life. But the fact that their final services were held at virtually the same time underscores the truth that, in the end, the humble and the exalted are the same. And while the wealth of one far surpassed that of the other, neither was able to buy nor talk his way into one more second of life.

And, although the crowds that flocked to the first funeral and sang the great man’s praises probably would not agree, neither man left this earth any better than the other.