The music of Igor Stavinsky emerges from the Steinway on the stage alongside New York City’s East River. Young Juilliard-trained pianist Steven Beck is performing a piano recital on the old railroad company barge that was converted 30 years ago into a floating concert hall. The barge is now permanently moored at the end of Old Fulton Street in Brooklyn. Bargemusic they call it.          

It’s a quirky space for listening to music. The interior walls of the houseboat-like structure are dark unfinished wood; there’s a brick fireplace on one side of the room. The barge sways and rocks—more or less, depending on the size of the boat that has passed most recently. Behind the low hardwood stage are floor-to-ceiling windows offering a view of the lower Manhattan skyline. The Brooklyn Bridge soars overhead.                    

Around the edges of the hall’s interior sits an accumulation of stuff that has built up over the years, typical of a well-used room that lacks adequate storage space. As I listen to the Stravinsky sonata, my eyes fall on five folding chairs leaning against the wall next to my elbow. The chair closest to the wall is a metal scratch-and-dent model. The other four are wooden chairs in various states of disrepair. One includes a brass plaque. Only the top of the plaque is visible—most of it covered by the chair in front of it.         

Silently, I separate the chairs so I can see the plaque. “In loving memory of Herbert Fishelman” reads the engraving.

Well, not much of a memorial for dear departed Herb, I think. The forlorn chair and Stravinsky’s pensive strains intertwine in my thoughts—a melancholy counterpoint.

After Stravinsky comes Brahms, and then the intermission.

As we walk outside onto the open deck, my mood reverses course. The sun, somewhere near the horizon behind the skyscrapers across the river, reflects brilliant gold off the Empire State Building in the distance to the north. The high-rise buildings nearby are growing darker in the early evening light, their hulking forms reflecting with salmon-colored clouds in the river’s rippled surface. A wharf spreads out on the north side of the barge. It is the historic site of Fulton Ferry Landing, where Robert Fulton introduced the world’s first steam-powered ferry. Across the wharf, lights twinkle in trees over outdoor tables at the Riverfront Cafe. It is a perfect summer evening—pure, unmitigated delight. Then a fireboat appears upstream and motors past, blasting eight streams of water high into the evening air.

No one hurries back to their seats, but eventually the concert resumes with exquisite performances of a Haydn fantasia and a Schubert sonata. The sky grows dark, the Steinway sings, city lights twinkle. Herb, his erstwhile memorial, and my earlier melancholy mood fade into my subconscious, but I continue to think about life and its "conclusion." If our legacy consists only in how we are remembered after we are gone, melancholy is the appropriate mood.

Someone once told New York filmmaker Woody Allen that he had surely achieved immortality through his award-winning films, to which he is said to have replied, “I’d rather achieve immortality through not dying.”

Wouldn’t we all? And that’s the point, isn’t it. If we have accepted God’s gift of eternal life, despite the fact that our mortal bodies and minds may wear out and we may go unconscious for a while, we will ultimately experience immortality through not dying. Never mind if the memorials set up by loved ones fade away. We won’t fade away.

Jesus said, “Whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:26). It beats an old brass plaque any day.