I will have no children to pass along the memory of my parents. My mother’s paintings. The shoeshine box my dad crafted when he was a young shop teacher. His high school ring. Letters I’ve saved. Mom’s journals discovered only after her passing. Flashes of memory that feel more vivid to me with each passing year, whether through the lens of familiarity or the embellishments of imagination. There’s no one left to care.
My brothers have their own children and grandchildren. They seem to have little need to linger in the past. Perhaps they were simply relieved to get out of our family alive, emerging whole and relatively unscathed. I don’t blame them. They have managed to keep our family’s afflictions at bay, becoming good parents and loving fathers in their own right.
That boisterous host of aunts and uncles are all gone now, and with them, the last firsthand recollections of my parents have vanished into the grave.
This leaves me holding on to the ghosts of my parents. The last chronicler. The final storyteller. And then I will be gone. And then my parents will be less than ghosts. They will become rumors. And then less than rumors. A name in an online family tree, dates on a headstone that, in time, will no longer warrant a second glance.
This reality weighs heavily on me. The memories of two people who once encompassed my entire world now rest solely in my hands. Perhaps this is why I find myself writing about them in my novels and memoirs. I fear the dry rot of time, which will turn even memories of memories into dust.
Somewhere, I needed to say it—to put it into words that might outlive me:
“These were my imperfect, confounding gods, whom I learned to love again.”
Last in Line