Forgetting things is easy. Forgetting names, the color of your classmates’ eyes, what day of the week it was when you lost your third tooth — it happens. Everyday, you’ll forget something, whether it’s something you remember later, like when your literature paper is due, or something insignificant, like whether or not you liked that girl in lecture’s question today.
It’s impossible to remember the face of every handshake, the reason for every laugh, the sound of every heartbeat. And people. People can be forgotten. You can be forgotten.
You are not permanent.
You may have realized this. You may have begun to stretch yourself out as far as you can, carving your name into set concrete with your fingernails, digging yourself into institutions and building yourself into infrastructures — but not because you particularly care.
You do it because something drives you to reach into anything that might outlast the mass of miraculously arranged protons, neutrons and electrons that traps you, that is constantly decaying all around you.
You leave every Facebook photo tagged, no matter how unflattering or embarrassing it is because it is a record. It is evidence that you were here and you did things and there they are, months after the moment, tangible, observable, unforgettable.
And even that might not make a difference.
A high school friend of mine died two years ago last Monday. It was tragic. The sort of thing that never lets you look at country roads lined with oak trees or red Mitsubishi Eclipses or life the same way ever again.
He was 18. Or maybe 19. I can’t remember.
I barely remembered the date. Dates are the hardest for me to remember. It never made sense to equate emotional milestones with numbers.
The speeches at memorial services aren’t neatly separated by dashes or hyphens. The silences between friends at lunch remain empty; there’s room for a zero to enter, to fill the gaping space between the explicit and the implicit — but it never arrives.
I wanted to check, to make sure that I was remembering the correct date because it seemed important. I decided to search for one of the newspaper articles chronicling the event. I turned to my keyboard, typed in the name —
Nothing.
Well, that’s untrue. There was one thing. One “hit.” One place in the seemingly infinite Internet that held a record of his name. But it was written by me, a year ago.
Has everyone else forgotten?
I know the Internet is not a record of every single human being’s thoughts and memories. But it seems like it is. And it seems like a person ought to show up there, if only to demonstrate solidarity. If only to show that someone else also thought his life was worth remembering.
I know that we cannot all be Martin Luther King, Jr. and exit the world with our words still echoing across vast oceans, smooth hillsides and ugly, monochrome street corners.
We cannot all be Che Guevara, our lives reduced to simple shapes and a single catchphrase, plastered on everything from the walls of City Hall to the t-shirt of the dropout who will never bother to read the Bolivian Diary.
We cannot all be Sacajawea, the truth of our story lost between the light chimes of colliding coins, our faces twisted and skewed to fit a purpose we never could have even anticipated.
We cannot all be immortal. But shouldn’t we be something? Doesn’t the miracle of our existence — the fact that out of all the possible arrangements of chromosomes and experiences, we emerged — doesn’t that merit some sort of recognition?
Do we, as human beings, have the capacity to remember everyone who comes in and out of our lives? Don’t they matter because they mattered to us, and don’t we matter, even if we cannot all be Darwin, our names turned into adjectives whose connotations we never endorsed?
Maybe I’m worrying about nothing. Maybe there are worlds and worlds of existence that come after this — worlds where people remember your name forever as soon as you say it, where the yellow hue of your friend’s hat is burned into your brain, where you remember without effort that it was a Wednesday in seventh grade when you first met him.
Or maybe there aren’t. Maybe all that’s left afterwards is a stretch of raw bark in a 100-year-old tree, some balled up fragments of windshield and a few stained gloves left by careless paramedics, littering the sun-filled roadside, yellow hat nowhere to be seen.
It’s why we build monuments and write obituaries and leave white crosses on highways. It’s why Marshall Livingston Perrin has a plaque in CAS 311 and why George Sherman has his own union. Just in case this is it. Just in case this is all there is.
Read the inscriptions on statues. Pay attention to the names in the newspaper. Notice the flowers at the edge of the roadway. All of them were markers left by people, just like you, who feared they would be forgotten.
I wish writing a column on mortality meant I had all the answers. I don’t. All I know is that those who are not here can still be present, if only we take the time to remember them. We can be legacies for those who did not have enough time to leave one.
Dan Dabner was killed in a car crash Oct. 2, 2004, he was 18-years old.
Megan Steffen, a sophomore in the College of Communication, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. she can be reached at [email protected].