From WNYC Radiolab program “After Life”:
An idea of death / the afterlife from David Eagleman that there are 3 stages of death: the moment your body dies, your funeral / when you are put into the ground and people gather to remember you, and lastly, the last time that anyone remembers you or mentions your name.
This means that after you are phyisically gone, the only way you exist is in other people’s minds – “since you only exist in other people’s minds you lose control of yourself and become who they want us to be” – maybe an amalgam of people’s memories of you and physical things you left behind (but always other people’s perception of you though the objects they are observing, or your thoughts or creative works that they are reading / observing).
See also the hundreds of cheesy dedications (Puff Daddy / Biggy), and exploitation by close family which would surely have repulsed them in their lifetime; ie John Lennon Citroen ad.
From here:
Pretty tasteless, but not the end of the world. Son Sean Ono Lennon defends it, saying it’s “hard to find new ways to keep dad in the new world,” and “you wouldn’t believe how many teenagers ask me who the Beatles were.” So, the answer to that can now be “that old-fashioned dude in the car commercial.”