The Art of Being: A Memory

In 2010, when the entire world seems to be represented virtually on the Internet, one would think that everything and everyone can be googled. Occasionally I google my name, partly as ego affirmation, partly to find out where my work is available or has been reviewed. Because I write, I turn up on several pages and literally hundreds of sites. Doesn’t everyone?

Apparently not.

On Sunday, December 12, my brother, Michael Allen Walling, succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the age of 56. He’d been a good kid brother; a good big brother to our sister, Carolyn; a good husband. He’d served in the Navy and gone on to a useful post-military career. (The photo inset shows him in his lab aboard the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier in 1976-77.) So out of curiosity I googled his name.

Nothing.

Not a single hit.

I suppose at some point there might be an obituary that google could find. But that seems such paltry recognition for a life well lived.

Many people—famous, infamous, ordinary—can be googled. Not finding my brother on the Internet, however, reminded me that far more people practice the sometimes not-so-simple art of simply being. They live on, then, not virtually in the electronic ether, but in the memories of those they loved and by whom they were loved.

And that’s art enough.