What is left behind by a life? Avoiding this question can be as much of an art as answering it. Philip Larkin wrote of ambulances, inexorable as plague carts, extracting those who are about to die from the commerce of the living. In his poem "Aubade" he describes the blank horror of extinction, the mind caught in the glare of it, the poet half-drunk and paralysed by dread of death. In this poem the living leave no legacy, unless it is self-delusion.
Helen Dunmore: facing mortality and what we leave behind | Books | The Guardian
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