Coverlets

Who Will Remember You?

At what point are their lovers’ letters burned, emails deleted and images scrubbed clean?

The definitive endpoint of a relationship was once the disposal of portraits and burning of love letters, or the termination of special email accounts that revealed personal information that ought not to be distributed.

By now, there are few who have not yet experienced the death of someone meaningful.

Immortality exists only in the imagination of those who knew them. Their memories persist one or two generations, depending on how closely a family communicated.

But rarely longer.

Among the historically significant, there will be monuments and memoirs perhaps names of civic buildings, bridges or schools. Realistically, memory of an individual life lasts a single generation.

Remember this: your family and friends are the only one who will remember. When they are gone, so will you.

Neither upon coverlets nor down, men come to fame, without which a man’s life has the selfsame substance as smoke in the air, or foam on the waves… (Dante)