Summer Showdown: To Be Remembered Not Forgotten

Dear Friends,

Someone once told me that people need to be remembered because once forgotten it is hard to remember someone special or someone important. I bring this up because of my former place of employment. Also because of the thousands of people I spoke to and served in the past ten years. I never realized that it is easy to forget someone until recently with my job and also my great aunt. Being forgotten is a part of life. Even famous people can be forgotten. We only remember them because of history and also society. So this going to be interesting because there are a lot of things and people I forgot in the past 15 years but hope to bring back to light.

First of all, I spoke of my great aunt. I tend to remember her daily but there have been days when I forgot she passed. When I speak of her, it is of the present tense not the past tense. I don’t want to forget a woman that was a part of my life until her death. Same goes with my grandparents. Even though I find it ironic that I remember my grandfathers more than my grandmothers. That is only because my grandfathers were imprinted in my long term memory. I remember them just like my great uncle. He took over the role of grandfather after my mother’s father passed. One thing I have always tried to remember them as they were not for what they might have done. Death is a part of life. However, remembering the dead gets harder each day.

After family, you tend to remember friends and people you know that passed. The blessing in that is most of my friends still live and happier. The few people that I have known to pass away are harder to remember because if I was not close to them, then I might have forgotten them. I don’t mean to be an asshole about that but then again, I lived in a city where people die over silly shit. Unlike family, friends are harder to remember if you weren’t close to them. My close friends were forgotten because of time, stress or a falling outs. Not death or lack of remembering.

What’s funny is that unlike people in your own personal life, celebrities are different. I bring this up because we live in a whole of uncertainties. Regular people die from normal things. Heart attacks, stress, disease and other things tend to shorten people’s life. Celebrities are not immune to that at all. As a kid growing up in the 1980’s and 1990’s, most of the older celebrities were dying because of natural causes and because we don’t live forever because humans are not designed like that.

Finally, I guess trying to remember people in your past regardless of who they are or what they have done for society in general does play a role in how you remember the past and the dead. I loved my grandparents and my great aunt and uncle. I still do. I also remember celebrities and historical figures. In the long run, when I am older, it is going to be harder to remember history but harder to remember my family history.

Eugene Chandler III