(how) (why) we remember

In her book The Correspondent, Virginia Evans’s narrator observes the general truth that we will all be forgotten in a relatively short time saying "...so that will be what is left of you, nearly erased, in fewer than three generations, and your life, the life you see from the inside, right now, will be reduced to the blood in their veins..." Her point is not lost on me, as I fondly remember my grandparents, some more so than the others, but I do not recall knowing my great-grandparents other than by name, photographs and family lore, that is, the stories told by others. I can remember the stories, but not the people, even while some vestige of their DNA runs through my veins.

It got me thinking about attachment, especially to our own thoughts. We need to know who we are, yes. We need to remember our names, directions home, skills we’ve mastered to work and play, yes. We have an identity and would be hard pressed to get on in our daily living without it. Memory is functional.

But, it is also emotional which is where the attachment arises, that is, the attachment to identity. Who doesn’t want to be remembered? It almost hurts to consider. Ah! But…

David Eagleman, a brilliant man, a neuroscientist, best-selling author, and polymath has an alternate take in his wonderful short story from his collection called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife. In a fascinating turn on this very same question, he muses on the horrible dilemma of never being forgotten. Happily, it's very short and it's on his website. Here, if you'd like to read it, is the link. https://eagleman.com/excerpt/ In the story, he contemplates the misery of people whose names are well-known and widely invoked to this day. We know very little of their actual lives yet we hold them up as icons of greatness or we idolize them as exemplars of morality, virtue, strength, character. We aspire to such renown (or perhaps infamy).

So, I ask myself: Do you want to be remembered? I suppose the answer raises the next set of questions – Why? By whom? For what? I do not have all the answers, at least good ones, to any of these questions yet, but it does remind me of something I like to say that I feel is sufficient here, and that is this: Wherever you go, leave love behind.

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4/27/2026