Why Did Benjamin Franklin Write His Own Gravestone at Age 22?

At age 22, Benjamin Franklin sat down and wrote what he wanted his gravestone to say.

He was a printer's apprentice. He had no fame, no fortune, no guarantee of anything. He was also, by most accounts, miserable. He worked under his older brother James, who ran the New England Courant in Boston. James was demanding, sometimes cruel, and legally bound to Franklin through an indenture that gave him almost no freedom. Franklin couldn't publish under his own name, couldn't leave without his brother's permission, couldn't even claim credit for the anonymous essays he slipped under the print shop door at night. He wrote about himself as a worn-out old book — contents torn out, gilding stripped, lying in the dirt.

And then he wrote the turn: "But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will appear once more, In a new and more elegant Edition, Revised and corrected By the Author."

At 22, Franklin believed he would be revised. That death wasn't an ending but a new edition of something ongoing. He wrote it like a printer — because that's what he was. And then he lived another 62 years and proved himself right in ways he couldn't have imagined.

He never actually used the epitaph. His real gravestone just says his name and his wife's name. Simple. Clean. The grand words weren't for the stone. They were for the 22-year-old who needed to believe the story wasn't over.

Maybe that's who epitaphs are really for. Not the dead. The living who still have work to do.