Well Dad,
My superstition tonight is off the charts. When I hugged you after you passed, I felt a terrible cold shudder go all the way through my body that lasted at least fifteen minutes. I felt as though it was the universe's way of telling me 'you're next.' When it came time to go to shul tonight, the final minyan of your mourning period, I decided to make an exception to my shul boycott and drive over. At first I couldn't find the keys to my car, and your car turned out to be literally dead. I know it's stupid but over the last thirty minutes, I've gotten it into my head that I've got about eighteen months left. I'm sure it's one of my many delusional superstitions, just one of the many ways my mind plays tricks on me that we never spoke about--you were not very understanding of such things: but given the way of my health, if we meet again in my forty-fifth year, let's just say I won't be too surprised.
God I hope this is just another passing moment of insanity. I'd feel more than a little cheated out of a decent life. I've written so much that's mediocre, unedited, less than what I could do. Somehow the idea of being forgotten frightens me much more than the end of life. Just a small wikipedia entry is enough, just enough to say 'he did that', but you always warned me I was wasting my life, so maybe it's what I deserve for not working harder.
The cessation of life itself is both scary and not that scary, the cessation of memory is what's scary to me. We watched both your parents fade into dementia simultaneously, but for me it began well before that. You and Mom and the rest of the family instilled in me a certain horror at the idea of forgetting from the time I was younger than E-- when I stopped speaking Yiddish out of embarrassment, I interpreted your clear disappointment in me as an accusation that I am one of the murderers of Yiddishkeit. That's a pretty heavy burden for a 4-year-old, and it's one I could never entirely let go.
But even without that, I remember contemplating as a kid with terrible dread at the idea of extinction: not the death of one, the death of everything--the idea that the world would burn up from when the sun turns into a red giant, or that everything might pass through a black hole and vanish forever, or watching that scene in Fantasia when the dinosaurs die off of starvation then watching earthquakes swallow their carcasses. That was so much scarier than the T-Rex.
If I go too, so many lessons of your life go with me. What was the point of all that if we just wasted it on each other? If I die before I pass on the stories and experiences and lessons of a person that larger than life, who did so much for others and especially me, who was an impenetrable knot of generosity and narcissism, confidence and insecurity, wit and anger, whose company was so much fun and so much agony: I will go wondering what my life was for, and to a lesser extent, wondering what your life was for too. To have spent that much time on me, expended that much energy; if it's to no use, I will have failed you who did so much, and failed myself who did so little.
You wouldn't care. Maybe your selflessness was a show like so much else of you, but you'd say it was all a joke and it didn't matter whether memory swallows any of us up forever. For all our similarities I was not born with that gene, and whether or not you cared whether the essence of you was passed on, the idea that it wouldn't be fills me with as much terror as you were. I don't see it as a writer's responsibility, I see it as a communal one. Maybe its the programming you installed from the earliest age, but the idea that we all pass without record of who we were offends me. What is the point of it all if every memory of us disappears?
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