After his father died, my friend said he had been struck by “the finality of forgetting,” the way people disappear when the last person who knew them passes away. He tried to tell his children about their great-grandparents, but could only give them a sense of their ancestors’ lives during the Depression, not who these elders were as people.
He and I shared the sadness of not being able to give people we love our memories of other people we had loved, in the hope they would love them too. “It’s as if earlier generations die a second death when the last generation to know them forgets about them,” my friend said. I knew what he meant. It’s a part of growing older I didn’t expect, the fading out of a past I’d thought I could pass on into the future.
