I just had the best summer of my life. I'm afraid that someday I'll just forget it all. What if Facebook suddenly crashes and all my photos and little stories disappear? I'm realizing now that I am relying on the internet to keep my records so that I can occasionally glance back and tell myself that yes, it all really happened.
When I was still young, my Grandmother began developing some form of dementia that grew progressively worse until she didn't even recognize her own family. I promised myself that I would try my absolute best to remember everything that ever happened to me. I began writing more, taking more pictures, and visualizing the few memories I still had of my early childhood. When I spent time around my Grandmother when she was at her worse, I often wondered, "If you completely lose memory of a person or event, isn't it like it never really happened in the first place?" I wondered if the time we spent talking to her and telling her stories and encouraging her really counted for anything, when we knew it would disappear for her in five minutes. And I realized that it wasn't much different than losing a memory in five years or a decade. Eventually, we'll all lose out memories. If not from dementia, death will do it. And because I'm young and have a big ego to take care of, I'm afraid my stories will just gradually disappear when I grow old and die, until the last trace of me is some great-grandchild growing old and muttering something like, "My Grandmother's mother... what was her name again?" And that will be it. My body will just be bits of carbon floating around and my last remaining photos will be tucked away in an attic underneath piles of photos of my own dead children. Finally, somebody will come across these photos and try to figure out who all these people are, and finally give up and get back to important business, like living. I mean, who really has time to look at old photos of mysterious, dead relatives?
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| Something I don't want to forget.. dear future great grandchildren: KEEP THIS ONE! |
