To Not Be Forgotten

   They’re coming. All around. Dark shapes. I see them like ghosts in dreams––when I look they vanish, like vapor at a breath, but out of the corner of my eye I catch them lurking in the shadows. Waiting. For me? Demons––where did they come from? It’s a strange thing, how we humans so desperately fear death . . . . But is it the actual pain of dying we fear? Or is it something beyond that––something more vast and more spiritual?

I think we fear being forgotten. For what is death, if not the catalyst that triggers the beginning of being forgotten? Such a fleeting glimpse of humanity is shown to us in our lives. We are born, tiny, insignificant, helpless. We grow. At some fatal point we comprehend our insignificance, and spend the rest of our futile days in a sort of tenacious hysteria, our every thought and shred of will bent upon imprinting our name in the history of humanity. To be remembered! Ah, but death, the great inevitable of mankind . . . . And time, given enough of itself, washes all away, even the deepest of footprints. Death is nothing but the beginning of the eradication of the finite measure of our memory.

   Such a sorry existence.

   Yet at the end of it all, I remain baffled. Why, while in our mad genius we have managed to walk on the moon and devise the atomic bomb, have we not over thousands of years managed to achieve such simple sense as to see that––perhaps––life is not about not being forgotten after you die? Perhaps it is more about for what you are remembered than how long. But what would I know?

   Ah, they come. And even I am caught in the conundrum.