Ashes to ashes

[tagryn]

Have been reading Stacy Horn's book The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City's Cold Case Squad. The preface was good, hitting on things we'd generally rather forget. I could definitely identify with these passages:

The minute you die you start to fade from the world and from the memories of the people who knew you. In a generation or two you're an old picture your great-grandchildren can no longer identify. The value of a treasured object, the letter from your dead father, the first gift your child ever gave you, something she made that you placed proudly on a windowsill in the kitchen so you'd see it every day - all of that is lost. As sad as it might be, we all die, then disappear. That has to happen.
[...]
My interest in the Cold Case Squad is probably rooted in a life-long interest in the subject of death and my own desire to not disappear. The likely possibility that the minute you die the meaning of your life immediately starts disintegrating until nothing remains has repeatedly left me frozen in an existential panic with absolutely no means of comfort. It shouldn't happen. If nothing else, I'm driven to slow that final vanishing down. I can't do anything about death, but I can try to affect memory...I want to recover the lost stories, cases, files, and name as many names as I can...we don't have to disappear. At least, not so completely or so quickly.