Mortality.

My parents have left for the weekend, to honor family members who have passed away. My grandmother, when my father was a teenager, had a miscarriage. My mother has lost both of her parents who died within a few years of one another. I remember my dead grandparents very well, think of them often, and dream about them sometimes. Honest people. Loving people. But, death is as much about potential as it is about endings, as with the half-brother my father never knew. What would he have been like? How would my grandmother's nature or personality have changed with a child? 

It seems strange to me, that in the modern world, we don't spend more time honoring our dead. We have become so removed from death-- I wonder if people today are aware of what happens to our bodies when we die. Only a few decades ago, the ceremony of death could go on for days. Families sat with the deceased. Washed them. Prepared them for burial. 

I'd like to be cremated. I feel no need of my corpse being honored by a small plot of land or an engraved headstone; even these attempts to prolong our memories are only temporary. There is a graveyard I visited once where the names on the headstones were eroded and many of the headstones had fallen over. Weeds and trees had reclaimed the whole plot. 

We only live on for as long as the memory of us does. That notion scares people. It scares me, but the simple truth is that there isn't room in the history books for all of us. The good live on a few centuries maybe, and the great for thousands of years. 

How long before Mother Teresa is forgotten? 

How well do any of us really know Alexander the Great?

There is a greater truth to death. We're all much larger than our memories. We've done more, lived more and hopefully, contributed more than what our headstones or our gravestones could ever bear. That comforts me. Which is why I am okay with one day becoming ash.