They feel it’s a validation that their lives mattered. If your loved ones forget you five minutes after you die, it’s like you made zero impact on them. Your life meant nothing.

I don’t think anyone expects survivors to sit around grieving and remembering them nonstop for years and years. That would be narcissistic in the extreme. But it’s not expecting too much to hope people will think fondly of you once in a while.

I lost a friend to covid. When something reminds me of him, I take a moment to appreciate his memory. Pushing it away or distracting myself to forget him would not make me happier.

Ego. Knowing that your name will still be referenced after you’re gone means it wasn’t all for nothing.

Death Is Nothing At All, By Henry Scott Holland

Death is nothing at all.

I have only slipped away to the next room.

I am I and you are you.

Whatever we were to each other,

That, we still are.

Call me by my old familiar name.

Speak to me in the easy way

which you always used.

Put no difference into your tone.

Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed

at the little jokes we enjoyed together.

Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.

Let my name be ever the household word

that it always was.

Let it be spoken without effect.

Without the trace of a shadow on it.

Life means all that it ever meant.

It is the same that it ever was.

There is absolute unbroken continuity.

Why should I be out of mind

because I am out of sight?

I am but waiting for you.

For an interval.

Somewhere. Very near.

Just around the corner.

All is well.

Maybe ask the person who said they wanted to be remembered?

Like anything else, the reasons for something are personal. It’s like asking someone why they like chocolate ice cream.

Because that is what emotionally healthy people do when someone they love dies. They remember that person and are aware of the positive impact they had on their lives, and grieve that the positive impacts that this person had on them and the world do not continue. Grieving is hard, but the pain does fade with time, and the positives of the memory eventually overshadow the negatives.

TL;DR hubris and ego, more or less

You should read the book Denial Of Death by Ernest Becker.

In the book Becker says that the fear of death is always present in human subconsciousness. Resulting in a drive to transcend death at least in a figurative way.

Most people don’t know the difference between themselves and an idea, so saving the idea is saving themselves.

narrator: it wasn’t

Leave no trace

I want to be worth remembering. That’s all. If I’m remembered, it means I’ve done something impactful. Hopefully it’s a positive.

Thing is most likely you wouldn’t be in an afterlife or be able to see anything or anyone, you would just cease to exist and you would be doing just as much experiencing and thinking as you did before you were born. So being remembered is a way of extending your existence by living in the minds of those you impacted in your life and knowing you made a difference, that it was worth you being born.

I’m not sure there is a reason. The instinct to continue existing is so fundamental that it doesn’t need any underlying reason, I think. We fear the end of our existence. So if we are remembered after we die, then we still exist in some way.

“Tell me I’m a good man.”

Alternately:

“Did I make you proud?”

“Every day.”

I don’t. I would like have offsprings but that doesn’t seem possible so might as well be forgotten.

It would be sad to know that people forgot about me although I would never know.