If you were gone – game over gone – how would I know?
Would someone call me, email me, or send a message? Or would it go unnoticed for months until I stumbled across a thread of condolences on social media? I could easily miss the news for a good while, especially on Facebook, where I rarely visit these days. Many of us have grown weary of that platform’s delirious journey—from Friendbook to Partybook, morphing into Marriagebook, then Babybook, before slipping into Divorcebook and, inevitably, landing at its spiritual antipode as Deathbook.
However I’d learn about it, you, to me, would no longer be like a gemstone that I assumed stayed vivid even when out of sight. Your life, once vibrant like a fresh leaf, would be swallowed by a gurgling tide, with all defining edges slowly eroded by the surf of existential entropy. The yin of life having given way to the yang of death. You’d be one less person I know, and one more I knew.
You may not have realized it before you died, but you were nearly helpless in deciding which details of your life came to the foreground and which were destined for oblivion. It’s all in the minds of others, after all. Memories of you, becoming increasingly desaturated and grainy like old photos, would appear like fleeting montages. Truth be told, by the mention of your name, some of us would also think of the time you were a shithead. We might also have an unpleasant reminder of when we may have behaved like assholes to you. Cue the pangs of regret. If we took the moral high road in retrospect, which we are often loath to do, our disagreements might seem so petty in the light of an entire lifetime of complex, interwoven narratives that we’d see you with a fresh and flattering perspective. Perhaps we’d prefer to nurse our nagging frustrations and incompetencies, letting old wounds cloud the view of your positive attributes.
If you’re lucky, the reasonable adults around will tell their children good things about you. Some may genuinely miss you and wish they still had your good listening ear for their daily grievances, or pine for your opinion on one matter or another about this thing called life. Others may wonder if they ever really knew you at all, while the vast majority of earth’s 8 billion humans know precisely nothing of you.
But I do know you, or knew you, whenever that day comes. So when the freshness of the news gives way to the distractions of the present, and the memories begin to loop, the unsettling truth comes to light: one chapter has been eclipsed by another.
The last time was the last time, but so long as you remain in the consciousness of the living, you’ll be immortal.
