Will You Remember Me?

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

A foggy drizzle shrouded the little yellow house in an air of forlorn resignation. Traffic whizzed by. Tires spit ponded water up and over the curbs evoking images of elementary school boys pitted against each other in a mischievous contest. Cars stopped and started as the three-eyed robot changed green, yellow, and red over and over and over.

Everyone was in a hurry to somewhere else. The planet hurtled on into the future. No one seemed to notice the past slipping away. Behind the modest little house, a new structure rose into the rain. Its open, hulking framework already overshadowed the more humble dwelling below. Such is the nature of progress: newer, bigger, better.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

The swishing of tires mingled with the echoes of time. Memories long ago buried under decades of the newer, bigger, and better began to dance into the here and now. His newly minted post-pubescent voice was startling as he prodded me to move with the traffic flow. We too had places to go and things to do.

He sighed an old man's weary sigh. “It doesn't seem fair . . . no one will know how truly wonderful she was. There has to be a way for us to see to it that she is never forgotten. More than just what we write on her headstone. I don't say a lot about her. She's gone. I can't change that. I don't even feel sad a lot. I guess that's the way Aspies are. Today, I'm sad. I miss her. I don't want her to be forgotten.”

By then, we were blocks and blocks away from the little yellow house that is really a dental office. Yet, as he spoke, the vision of the new office overtaking the old swam before my eyes. “Tell me more.” I almost whispered lest his spell be broken.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

“No one will ever know how much she encouraged me. I didn't spend enough time with her, and I think maybe I was mean a lot of the time when I did. I don't know why I acted like that. I know I've changed, but I'm sorry she doesn't know it. Every time I saw her, she encouraged me to act better, to study harder, to love Jesus with my whole heart. She always prayed with me. All she ever did was encourage me. She never knew how much she did.”

His pent up emotions seemed to surprise him. The foggy drizzle of his grief surrounded us both and swept us away. I reached across the van and clasped his hand. “Oh, she knew. She knew. When you would run giggling to the car while yelling, 'Hurry! Let's RUN before Woodruff catches us!' she knew. It was your special game, and it always ended with her getting one more squeeze.” We began to laugh even as tears threatened like rain.

I led him gently down the path of grief even tho' I, myself, have yet to grope and pick may way across the same terrain. "As you grow into the fine young man you are becoming, everyone who knows you will know about her. They will see her in you. When asked why you are who you are, you will have the opportunity to tell them about her impact on you. I guess you need to be mindful, as you continue to become a man, what you want her legacy to be. You are her living legacy. She will not be forgotten because she lives on in you and your brother.”

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

The little yellow house cum dental office sat in the rain awaiting the not too distant day when heavy equipment will scoop it up and away. A parking lot will erase all but whispers on the wind. New patients will come and go as younger dentists continue on where their mentor laid a foundation.

In a decade or so, no one will remember the modest yellow office that sat shaded by old oak trees who stood guard as children became parents with children of their own. Even before the old building is gone and the new one has begun to fulfill its purpose, the never ending process of life has begun all over again. Past, present, and future entwine like drizzle in the wind.

I saw the future coming but could not imagine how quickly it would arrive. Baby Boomers around me are graying, and their steps are no longer as buoyant or triumphant as they were only a decade ago. We begin to face our own mortality and wonder when immortality betrayed us.

2011

The face in the mirror stares back as we begin to take stock of victories won and battles still raging. More than a few wonder why we ran so hard to lay hold of something we could not catch when what we had was all we ever needed. No matter what the questions echoing back from the mirror of our souls, we realize now that life boils down to one small question: When I am gone, will you remember me?

Ecclesiastes 1:9-11

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. 

                                                        

Hebrews 11:13-16

Courtesy B. Creasy

These people all died controlled and sustained by their faith, but not having received the tangible fulfillment of [God's] promises, only having seen it and greeted it from a great distance by faith, and all the while acknowledging and confessing that they were strangers and temporary residents and exiles upon the earth. Now those people who talk as they did show plainly that they are in search of a fatherland (their own country). If they had been thinking with [homesick] remembrance of that country from which they were emigrants, they would have found constant opportunity to return to it. But the truth is that they were yearning for and aspiring to a better and more desirable country, that is, a heavenly [one]. For that reason God is not ashamed to be called their God [even to be surnamed their God--the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob], for He has prepared a city for them.