Remembering Me

I remember all my relatives who are gone. It helps that I have family albums with photos of them, but I also remember my own interactions with them throughout my childhood, the scenes that no pictures ever recorded at all. Aunts, uncles, cousins are all vivid in my mind. I'm like my mother, and I can recall almost in technicolor so many of my exchanges with them.

I have created biographical pages to preserve family history but many family members didn't read the history booklets that my mother worked so hard on and gave to them. It really hurt her that they were apathetic. I saw this and I learned that is how they will react when I am gone, too.

I know exactly who will forget about me and who will do it the quickest when it is my turn to leave earth. With some people in my family, I will be gone and forgotten in a few hours at most or a couple of days, except for their intense curiosity as to whether I left (them) any money. That's all they ever cared about, especially Trazanna, my ex-sister-in-law who was the former wife of my younger brother Ron. I helped her financially in major ways at great sacrifice to myself until I realized, or rather it was demonstrated to me by her, that she wasn't really interested in anything else. My younger brother, who was her husband, will focus on my money like a laser, to try to get most or really all of it for his own use and squandering.

My younger brother's daughter, Rachel, will briefly remember me for helping her financially. However, she doesn't really know me and she would be susceptible to the self-serving, extreme lies that my brother has told many people about me.

My younger brother's son, Ronald, will remember me but not only because I helped him financially. He is one of the few relatives who values me as a person and who seemed to have a liking of me and a connection from his earliest days as a child. In him I will live on for a while longer but the powerful forces of his mother wishing me to be out of their lives will conflict with and work against his recollections of me. She would greatly prefer that I disappear so that she doesn't have to think of the terrible way she treated me when she was supposed to repay my financial help and didn't do so.

I saw how my nieces and nephews handled the death of their mother, who was my sister, since December of 2021 when she passed away. The story is complicated and she didn't always have positive relationships with her adult children. One daughter, Shayla, who lives in Texas, apparently wanted to or tried to continue receiving and using my sister's Social Security income and pension income. My death will be meaningless to her and she will remember me, if at all, for the time when she used my credit card frivolously and never repaid what she owed during their move to Texas.

I have continued to talk to my sister's other daughter, Sonya. and one of my sister's sons, Glen. They are both extremely good people. They will remember me the longest but Glen is so busy with his job that his time remembering me will be compromised as a result.

In my case, other people who are coworkers and neighbors will move on within a few days or less. My online connections mostly won't know because there won't be anyone to tell them.

Most people I know will not think about me within a month, let alone a year, five years, ten years, twenty years or in more distant decades later. People live on inside of us, if we embrace their history and spirit, but in them I will have a short to very short life. This is simply reality.

I may be remembered through my photographs and writings but only if I am able to leave them in the care of an appropriate person. Currently this is unlikely.

Thus there won't be anyone who will remember me as I have remembered others.

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