I loathe forgetting.
Which is probably a huge part of my paranoia. Over the past few months, I've really started to question my life. The biggest question has been "What am I doing?"
Just in general. And that question morphed into, "What am I doing that I'll be remembered for?"
Let's take a minute to think about all the people who have lived and died.
How many of those people could you name?
Let me ask you another question.
Could you tell me your great great grandfather's name? How about what he did for a living? Was he a Christian? Did he have a family?
I know I can't answer any of those questions... and he's related to me. He's my blood. And I have no idea who he was.
We forget.
I don't want to be forgotten.
"Augustus, perhaps you'd like to share your fears with the group."
"My fears?"
"Yes."
"I fear oblivion," he said without a moment's pause. "I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark."
"Too soon," Isaac said, cracking a smile.
"Was that insensitive?" Augustus asked. "I can be pretty blind to other people's feelings."
Isaac was laughing, but Patrick raised a chastening finger and said, "Augustus, please. Let's return to you and your struggles. You said you fear oblivion?"
"I did," Augustus answered.
Patrick seemed lost. "Would, uh, would anyone like to speak to that?"
I hadn't been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed. I was a fairly shy person—not the hand-raising type.
And yet, just this once, I decided to speak. I half raised my hand and Patrick, his delight evident, immediately said, "Hazel!" I was, I'm sure he assumed, opening up. Becoming Part Of The Group.
I looked over at Augustus Waters, who looked back at me. You could almost see through his eyes they were so blue. "There will come a time," I said, "when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this"—I gestured encompassingly—"will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."
This is an excerpt from one of my favorite books, The Fault in Our Stars by John Greene.
This book is simply amazing, but this excerpt from Chapter One grabbed me and would not freaking let go.
Because I fear oblivion.
I know, I know, I shouldn't. I am put on this earth for God's purpose, and God should not be forgotten, and it shouldn't matter whether or not I'm remembered.
But.
It bugs me. It bugs me, that in 200 hundred years, no one will know my name. No one will even know I lived on this earth. No one will know I liked my coffee with a minimal amount of sugar, and was scared of jellyfish, and danced with my little siblings in the kitchen to Neon Trees. No one will know that today I went to seven different stores with my mom looking for one stupid dress, and she almost passed out in the middle of Target from laughing at me. No one will know I adopted my little baby brother this past spring. No one will know I sat in a cold wet deer stand for hours just because I got to spend time with my dad. No one will know about this blog. No one will know my passions, my love, my fears. No one will know I existed.
And dang if that doesn't scare the crap out of me.
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