Confession: I'm Afraid of Being Forgotten

An interrogation of my fear of being forgotten as time marches forward.

**Trigger Warning: cancer, death, and the fear of being ephemeral**

I’m chilling in Discord with my friends, as we typically do at this time of day on this day of the week. They’re playing “Don’t Starve Together” while I’m writing this post. And as I’m writing this, I have three days of waiting until I find out if I’m imagining this lump in my breast or not.

Ever since I first heard about cancer as a child, I’ve worried about developing it. My 5th grade teacher’s nephew—who was a few grades below me—passed away from cancer before I hit my teenage years. So I’ve never felt safe from it’s deadly reach.

I’m not as anxious as I thought I would be in this situation, though. I’ve waited before to receive serious diagnoses, and the period of time before the long-awaited appointment is typically filled with panic. I’m talking heart palpitations, shaking hands, disassociation (iykyk), all of it. The waiting gives me time to consider every horrible possibility and to imagine how it’ll change my life and my future. And while I *have* spent a decent amount of time ruminating on what a cancer diagnosis would mean, the panic isn’t there. And I don’t feel detached. I feel present and connected with my emotions, which are complex and hard to detangle from one another. There’s the feeling of being Schrodinger’s cat—because the lump is currently unobserved by any medical professional who would be able to discern whether it’s supposed to be there or not, it means I both “must have cancer” and “must not have cancer” at the same time. The probability that it’s either cancer or body part is equal, so therefore both must be true at the same time. Or whatever. It’s some sort of liminal space between the two.

Therefore, I must be in denial.

Which, it’s true, there’s a part of me that believes it’s impossible for me to get cancer. If I’m not imagining this lump (which is totally a possibility), then it **MUST** be a benign tumor or a calcium deposit. That is the only possible reality my brain is willing to accept.

But I have poor health, and bad luck, so it could be that it IS, in fact, cancer. Am I really ready to accept that as a possibility?

I haven’t written my book, yet! I haven’t lived my life’s purpose. Therefore, I must be invincible. How could I be mortal *right now* when I haven’t done what I’ve been set on this earth to do? Yet even while believing in my immortality, I’m terrified that I’ll die before I live out my purpose. What if I never write and publish a book? What if I never figure out how to make things better for everyone, or even just the people I care about?

More frightening to me than death itself is the idea that someday I will be forgotten. I have no family to carry on my memory. Eventually my friends will forget me in the busyness of life. And for the friends that don’t forget, eventually they will stop existing as well, and it will be as if I never existed.

Why am I so afraid of being forgotten? After I’m gone, it’s not as if I’ll be around to regret being forgotten. I’ll be focused on new adventures in the afterlife, or maybe reincarnation is the system death works on and I’ll be a fresh being in a big world. Memory itself is fragile and impermanent, much like life. Inevitably, there comes a time when everything remembered crumbles into nothingness.

This fact should be encouraging. It suggests that human value is not dependent on being remembered. Some truly awful people are remembered, while many incredible people have been lost to time. This means that my value as a person is not dependent on others’ opinions of me. Human value is inherent.

Despite knowing this, I’m still afraid of being forgotten.

Maybe this fear stems from my personal experiences.

In elementary school, I played soccer on a team with both boys and girls. My coach’s eldest son was my age, and when we were reintroduced to each other at the start of the next school year, we discovered we shared the same class. We were very different people but shared enough key interests that we became friends. I spent many hours at their home playing in the backyard various games and scenarios inspired by my friend’s love of military history.

One year, my friend’s dad passed away very suddenly from a heart issue. His funeral was held at the Catholic church my friend attended. Every seat in the sanctuary was taken. I'm pretty sure most of the town turned out to pay their respects. We all sat shoulder-to-shoulder as the priest gave the mass and swung the thurible and performed all the other rituals.

Our friendship faded as we entered middle school. We never really connected again after that.

Then, in my last year of high school, my childhood friend tragically passed as well. Just like at his dad’s funeral, we all packed into the Catholic church’s rather large sanctuary, and shoulder-to-shoulder we grieved for the loss of this wonderful life.

When I still lived in that city, I would visit his grave on the way home from college classes. I often wondered how many people took the time to visit him and remind him that he was cherished for the time he was with us.

Time marches on, people move away, lives get busy. And someday all who remember my childhood friend will be gone as well. There will come a point in time where he is remembered for the last time, and any mention of him will be legend of a person who once was.

And someday, that shall be my fate as well.

Just, please, not anytime soon.

Photo by Rachel Cook on Unsplash