I remember that the day my little brother Thomas was born, the rain was relentless. I sat by the glass-paned doors in our sun-room and I watched the trees bow underneath the roaring sky. Fifteen-year-old me, faux intellectual that I was, ruminated on it all of course. I've always thought there was a sort of poetic, eternal quality to rain, to the cycle of it all. It precedes everything in human memory and will outlast human existence. It's universal, like music, transcending our control. It has always been there and will always return.
There's something so fundamental about rain, something I yearn for to ground my own life. That sense of purpose and permanence eludes me. No matter how hard I try, I cannot convince myself that my life is particularly important, or that anything I do or that anyone does will have significance in a way that will somehow outweigh mortality. In the end, death makes us all look like fools, all our pursuits and ambitions no more than transient larks.
I visited my grandfather's grave for the first time last summer. He died 20 years before I was born, just after my father graduated from college. We spent maybe half an hour looking for his gravestone in the cluttered Houston cemetery, once with the plots spaced far apart and now overrun by hordes of the quiet dead. At some point, this outlying neighborhood had become a bustling, mostly-Vietnamese suburb, and as these newcomers made their livelihoods there, so too did they make their deathbeds. My dad remembered his father was near a tree on a particular stretch of road, and as we went up and down the rows of names looking for his Randolph Annan Mayer I began to feel a sense of dread and panic. I knew it was there, somewhere, but the search gave me the prickling realization of how much we felt we needed to find it. If we couldn't find that name carved into a granite stone out here in an arbitrary plot of ground in an arbitrary neighborhood in an arbitrary city, then it was almost as if he had never existed. I needed to know that his name was written down, so that I could be reassured that I, too, would not be forgotten. If only I could get my name written down somewhere, if only someone cared enough that their mother or great-grandfather grew inside of me once, cared enough to want to look in libraries for a record of my obituary if only my name could outlast these fleeting bones of mine, then I could never be quite gone forever. But even my name will fade into tiny lines of print between other tiny lines of print, and who will care about me the way I can be cared about as a warm, smiling body with an unchecked laugh and trippingly quick mouth? Who will know me when all those I've met are also just carved names?
I don't mean to be trite. Talk of death and ephemerality is nothing new. But for as long as I can remember, my mind has been stuck in zoomed-out mode. I find it exceedingly difficult to think ahead even three days, but I find it unavoidable to think about the so-called "big picture," which is really not a picture at all but rather a (likely misguided) sense that we are a part of some fated and miraculous web of being. The eternal goes about dwarfing my to-do lists on a daily basis, telling me to grasp at the moments I have while I have them, but in the end never allowing me to build something I can determinedly pretend is permanent the way so many of my peers seem to be able to do.
I won't say that I haven't wasted days or that I won't again. But once my mother or my father watched me sleep the way I watch Thomas now, breathing in and out, and thought about how my many possible futures stretched out from me robust and full, like leaved branches in summer. They saw me as the most important legacy they could ever leave. My name may be written in hundreds of books or it may rest forgotten in some corner of an overcrowded graveyard, visited sporadically every few decades, but it won't matter either way. Because it isn't real that sort of immortality is all illusion. We are not our records. We are not our obituaries or our gravestones or even a list of our accomplishments. We are that feeling when you first hold hands, the sharp pleasure of sex or the pain of breaking a bone, or that hot headache of grief when we lose someone we love. We are the lived moments, not their subsequent recording. The only thing that lives forever is the rain, and just like Thomas came in with it, one day he will go out with it.
So don't take life too seriously, don't build yourself into structures of success that have been carved out for you by impersonal norms. Because no matter how polished or extensive your obituary eventually is, it is only a bloodless summary of you. It can never capture your life the way you can in each moment. Go ahead and work hard in your coveted job, and have a grand staircase and host dinner parties be ambitious and proud. But let the rain remind you it will all wash away, for death comes knocking mockingly, death comes knocking loud.
