Will Anyone Remember Us in 100 Years? The Truth About Our Impact

I’m struggling with some sadness, some weights behind my eyes that have taken hold of me and make my eyelids feel so heavy that I want to cry, but I don’t. In searching for what is making me ache like a joint pain in a shoulder but one that is not tangible enough to take an Advil to remedy, I ponder what will make me feel better. Certainly, Advil doesn’t cure this kind of pain and other substitutes just mask it for a day to re-appear even fiercer the next.

There is a video going around that says no one will have known us in 100 years, nor will they care. Our houses will be occupied by people we don’t know, our cars likely scrap metal. Our clothes would be frayed and tattered, likely in a landfill or trash pile and if they happened to survive would be used for dress up of the old n days. The video is supposed to convey Carpe Diem and that we are supposed to seize the present day! Enjoy it, hold onto it, memorize its details for soon it will be part of the ash that we become.

It doesn’t make me feel like seizing the day, it makes me feel like crawling into my bed and pulling a thick goose feather duvet over my head and wishing it were somehow different. How are we, kind, beautiful, talented human beings reduced to a picture slide show and have zero remembrance after our siblings, children, grandchildren, and possibly great grandchildren are gone?

Do you know anything about your great, great, great grandmother and grandfather? I would likely doubt it. Then this would in fact prove to me that the video going around is correct and in 100 years no one will care to know that we existed.

However, even if not realized or spoken, there is a trail of genetics and lineage. Maybe my great, great grandmother had thick curly hair like mine. Possibly my great, great grandfather had green eyes like mine. They also could have passed on any number of genetic traits. I’m thinking though that they passed on something even more.

My aunt, who recently passed away, had kindness, humor, caring, resiliency, a personality you always wanted to be around. Is it possible that her great, great grandmother shared these personality traits? Is she ever really forgotten then? Are the people that come before us, even 100 years before us, passing us a piece of their soul in making the next generation who they are, and the next, and the next? Even the littlest of souls who have come to earth for a short time have shown traits and qualities that will continue in all those that knew them. Not just for the next generation but for many, many, infinite generations because their life in some form changed ours and left us permanently different than if they would not have lived. 

So, it’s not the time that matters it’s the impact and it doesn’t have to be anything mind blowing or amazing, it can just be simple. It can be putting on another pot a coffee for the company, hoping they will stay a bit longer. It can be saying silly things. It can be the feeling you get when someone makes your favorite treat, and you want to do that for someone else. It can be always asking if you need help and frying endless perogies when you actually are the guest. All of these little things have now become a part of you and because they are part of you, they are part of others around you, and it goes, on, and on and on. It doesn’t have to be genetic either, it is part of you because you lived it and the impact it made on your behavior influences the next and the next.

It is not just a slideshow, it is how you have lived that has permanently impacted those around you that will last in them forever and forever isn’t in 100 years when your name is forgotten, it is infinite because it spreads and is even more powerful than genetics.

It’s 2124 and there is a girl with thick hair and beautiful eyes, who everyone wants to be around because she is so kind, funny, caring, and nurturing and she may never know and we may never know but she got some of this from Auntie Violet who got it from someone else and it has went on and on and on and even though that girl doesn’t know it, all of us are in her because we knew Auntie Violet and carried it on years and years after we lived.

Now that makes me feel better. I hope you do too, knowing we are here for much, much longer than just the time we had to live. We have all been permanently changed by those that came before us, and we permanently change those that come after us. Those traits have not been forgotten, and they never will be.

Chat again soon,

Michelle