All the Lives We Touch | Reflections on Life and Connection

Last week I went to a funeral.

Tom was a former colleague, someone I genuinely loved working with. Tom was one of those rare people that absolutely everyone really liked. He died of liver failure, far too young, leaving behind a wife and two very young children. There's nothing fair about that.

There were hundreds of people at his funeral.

And I knew hardly any of them.

I looked around at all these unfamiliar faces, struck by the fact that we'd all come to say goodbye to the same man, yet most of us knew nothing about one another.

Tom's wife, mother, father, sister and best friend gave the most beautiful tributes. They spoke about the man they knew and loved, sharing stories, memories and moments from a life that had meant so much to them.

I knew another part of Tom's life. The working part. And really, only a tiny piece of that.

Tom was one of the very few people with whom I would enthusiastically arrange a work meeting. Ours usually involved walking around West Stow, getting excited about ideas, possibilities and all the things we might do. Work meetings that left me energised and excited.

His family didn't know me. I didn't know them. They knew nothing of the time Tom and I had spent together, just as I knew nothing of the countless experiences he'd shared with them.

And it struck me how much of our lives is lived beyond the knowledge of the people closest to us.

Think about it.

Your partner might know you better than anyone, but they don't know every conversation you've had, every friendship you've formed, every encounter that's stayed with you. Your children know you as a parent, your colleagues know the person you are at work, your oldest friends remember versions of you that others have never met.

There are entire chapters of our lives that exist only in the memories of the people who were there.

Not because we're keeping secrets. That's just the nature of being human.

I sometimes think we get rather attached to the idea that we know people. That we've worked them out. We know what they're like, what they'll say, how they'll behave. But we're all so much more complicated than the version of ourselves that any one person gets to see.

We each carry around this extraordinary collection of experiences, relationships and memories that nobody else can ever know in its entirety.

There's something rather lonely about that thought.

And something wonderful about it too.

Because while we experience life from our own separate vantage points, we're constantly becoming part of other people's lives. We wander in and out of one another's stories, sometimes for decades, sometimes for a few minutes. A friendship, a shared joke, a conversation over coffee, a colleague who makes the working day more enjoyable.

We rarely stop to consider the impression we might have made, or the place we occupy in someone else's memories.

We tend to think of our lives in terms of the things we've done, the places we've been, the people we've loved. But there's another part of our lives that belongs, in a way, to other people. The kindnesses they remember, the conversations that changed something for them, the encouragement we gave without realising it mattered.

We might never know about any of it.

And I find that fascinating. We spend so much of our lives wondering whether we're doing enough, achieving enough, making any difference. Yet some of the most meaningful things we contribute to the world might be things we barely remember doing.

A few words of encouragement. An unexpected kindness. Making someone laugh when they've had a rotten day. Something that seemed entirely ordinary to us but stayed with someone else for years.

We have no way of knowing how far those connections extend.

At Tom's funeral, hundreds of these separate worlds came together in one room.

Every person had their own memories of him, their own reasons for being there, their own piece of a life that nobody else could see in its entirety.

It made me think about how strange it is that we can be so fundamentally alone in our experience of life, and yet so deeply connected to one another.

I didn't speak to Tom's wife. I couldn't think of anything I might say that would offer much comfort. But I was glad I'd gone.

I've always thought it important to show your respects, and that afternoon reminded me why.

You don't have to know the family. You don't have to have been a lifelong friend. You don't even have to find the right words.

Being there says something.

I hope that when Tom's family looked around that room, they took some comfort from the sheer number of people who had come to say goodbye.

They already knew how much they loved him. They knew the place he occupied in their own lives.

What they couldn't possibly have known was the place he occupied in everybody else's.

And there, gathered together, were hundreds of people who had come to show them.

I find that an extraordinarily moving thought.

That a person can travel through life, touching so many other lives, without any of us ever seeing the full extent of it.

And that, occasionally, we get a glimpse.