Mona arrived in this world on December 16, 1940, an early Christmas gift to an adoring family. After 85 remarkable years, on the morning of August 4, 2026, she said one final goodbye, left her body, and returned home.
In the months before, when it became evident her life was ending, Mona and I talked many times about the life she’d lived, and one question troubled her most: Did it really matter? I’ve known Mona for 58 years, so I assured her that of course it did; it was a big life. She’d reply with, I think it’s been small. I haven’t really accomplished much.
I asked her, When your spirit soars and your body turns to ash, what would you like us to do with the ashes? And she would say, Oh, I haven’t really traveled much in these past 60 years; I’ve spent most of them right here, in this house, so just scatter them in the backyard.
I asked, What about a memorial to honor the life you’ve lived?, and she’d insist, Oh no, I don’t want a memorial. She was scared no one would come. (She gave us permission later, and wait till you read what happened.)
Mona’s assessment of her life was completely misguided… and that’s completely understandable. Our consumer culture measures worth through achievement, so when Mona’s accomplishing slowed with age, she felt her self-worth slipping away. But, in reality, it hadn’t diminished at all. As researchers Scarpa et al. (2022) documented in their study of older adults, while Mona’s “occupational mattering” declined after 65, her “interpersonal mattering” grew. Simply put, Mona did less but spent more time with the people who mattered most.
It’s All of Us
This wasn’t just Mona. Looking at the research, we see the same thing at every age: We underestimate how much we matter.
Kumar and Epley (2023) had people perform small acts of kindness, handing strangers cups of hot chocolate, then asked these givers how much they thought the gesture mattered. Every time, givers undervalued their impact, focusing on the act itself (Was it big enough, impressive enough?) while recipients were moved by the warmth and generosity it conveyed.
Boothby et al. (2018) documented the “liking gap”: After everyday conversations, people consistently underestimated how much their partners liked their company. And Zhao and Epley (2021) found the same pattern with compliments: Again and again, people understated the impact of their generous, supportive words.
Across acts of kindness, conversations, and compliments, we see the same thing—people reaching for consumer culture’s yardstick and asking, Was what I said, what I did, good enough? Big enough? We’re quick to decide we’ve fallen short, missing how much we matter in the lives we touch.
What I Discovered in the Days That Followed
In the days that followed Mona’s passing, the truth surfaced.
An in-home nurse, who’d been with us when Mona crossed over, approached me. A native French speaker still struggling with English, she managed a single word, Mama! Yes, I said. Mona was my mother. But the nurse shook her head, as if I’d missed her meaning… because I had. No, she insisted, BIG mama! This nurse had seen what Mona herself struggled to see: She was the beating heart of our family.
A little later, walking down the hill from my mother’s house, I realized I still hadn’t reached one of her younger cousins, Therese. When Therese answered my call, she burst into tears. Oh no! Oh no! she cried, because she knew. Can I tell you something? I assured her she could. I always looked up to your mother. She was my role model. I always wanted to be a Mona!
And that memorial Mom feared no one would come to? Sixty people came, each carrying beautiful stories. By the one measure that actually predicts well-being—sociometric status, meaning the connections we have with family, friends, and neighbors (Anderson et al., 2012)—my mother’s life was enormous.
My Mom simply missed it, because consumer culture never built a vehicle for delivering the message to her.
The Social Mirror
For two million years, things were different: We lived in villages, small bands of 30 to 150, moving each day among the very people whose lives we shaped. The sick mother we carried soup to last night was huddled beside us the next morning, warming her hands at the same fire. The child we steadied through losses early in life was reaching for our hand at the dinner table. Our significance was never something we could forget, because it was reflected back to us daily in the faces (and embraces) of people who were genuinely glad we were here.
But consumer culture leaves all of us without that social mirror. In its place, it hands us a yardstick, a poor substitute, and we measure ourselves with it: How much did I achieve? How far did my name travel? By that measure, we all fall short, because we can never achieve enough to feel valuable… we’re not wired that way.
The simple truth is that most of us live lives that look like Mom’s, contained and local. And yet they are not small, not even close, because to the people we touch, we help hold their world together. We just don’t have people telling us, or telling us often enough, the way a village once did.
Mom tried to fix this, single-handedly. At her memorial, person after person spoke of my mother’s hospitality, and when my turn came to talk, I explained, Mom grew up in a family village, an extended family all under one roof. And what she wanted, more than anything, was to give you that one thing that had always stayed with her: a welcoming so large that you knew you mattered.
On the morning Mom left her body, she told the people gathered around her: When I’m gone, become one family, one village, loving each other deeply, sticking together, and reminding each other, “You matter so much.”
Because each of us does.
