Remember Me

by  Roy Christman

A bigger fear than dying is the fear that after we die we will be forgotten.   Coco, a Pixar film released in 2017, has as a theme the idea that people exist in an afterlife until they are completely forgotten.   At that point they literally fade away.

When we die we will be mourned for a time by our friends and relatives, and some of us may be remembered for years.   A few of us (Aristotle, Cleopatra, Mohammed) may be remembered, or even worshipped for millennia, but those are rare exceptions.   Even a powerful king may be forgotten after a few centuries pass.   Shelley captures this in the last few lines of his poem Ozymandias, describing the ruins of a statue in the desert:

And on the pedestal, these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains.   Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Most of us won’t even get a statue lying in pieces in the desert.   We will be forgotten completely once the people who knew us have also died.   I do remember, dream about, and continue to be influenced by, my Mother and Father.   I remember my paternal grandfather, who died when I was in my twenties.   On the other hand, my maternal grandfather, who died when I was two, is only a subject of family lore and an old man in a few black-and-white photos.

Nonetheless, we do our best to be memorialized.   We erect headstones, some with messages.   Mine, already standing in the Trachsville cemetery, says, “Never shopped at Wal-Mart,” while Linda’s has a beautiful quotation from a Jane Kenyon poem.   We keep diaries and hope they end up in the archives of our local historical museum.   We write poems and store them in a drawer, hoping they will be discovered a la Emily Dickinson.

Beginning in the Civil War, it became more common for memorials to record the names of the dead.   In Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, the monument to the Union dead has a long list of area Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch boys who died in the Civil War.   While I don’t know any of them, I have often read their names.   The ultimate attempt to memorialize the dead may be Maya Lin’s monument to the Americans killed in the Vietnam War.   The men (and eight women) listed there may have died in a useless war, but at least their names are incised in polished granite.   You can make rubbings of those names, leave flowers, take photos, and reflect.   And you can reflect literally, seeing yourself stare back in that polished granite.

When we see pictures of coffins of coronavirus victims being stacked in rows in a New York paupers’ grave, we wonder who they were.   What kind of life did they have?   What were their dreams?   We feel bad for them.   We are aware that no one will remember them, even for a week or two.   Sad life, sad death.

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