I have always been a very strange creature. Most people refer to themselves as a human being but I choose not too. Therein lies the fact that I have never been normal either. It was a long standing joke in my family to call me an "old woman" even at the young age of ten. "Life in all its predictability left me bored and listless." Is it pathetic that by the age of ten, I had that thought? Possibly, but in all my musings over everything that can be mused on, I just don't care if it is or not. It should come as no surprised, to anyone really, that also at that age I was musing on the inevitability of death with my cousin Marvin while cutting up strawberries.
At the time I had hated strawberries. I didn't like the color, and I thought they were bitter and tart like lemons minus the sour taste. I had been sitting at the kitchen table, a very large brown and old table, with more memories than the human mind could comprehend. There was a large white bowl, a mixture of cream and several cans of condensed milk inside, that I was casually tossing cut up strawberry into. I was helping to make strawberries and bananas' in cream for desert. It was my favorite, even though I always picked out all the strawberries and just ate the banana slices. I was working on the strawberries while cousin Marvin cut up the bananas for me. For the longest time we had conversed over the inevitability of death. I had been striving for a new topic of conversation for weeks. We discussed various things ranging from art to politics and this is what we came up with for today. For some reason Marvin had the strong opinion that because I was still so young I did not have a firm grasp on the concept of death and it's meaning.
Of course I firmly and vehemently contradicted him. There was nothing that I hadn't turned over in my mind at one point or another. None-the-less I listened to what he had to say. I turned a strawberry over in my fingers, and paying more attention to him than what I was doing, I cut it. Pain flashed through my finger, and I stared shocked at a long fairly deep cut running through it's length. The tip of the knife was stained with blood and I dropped both the knife and the strawberry on the table. Bright crimson dripped from my finger onto the still life form of the strawberry. To me there was a bright contrast between my blood and the strawberry. Blood symbolized life as it coursed through the veins of all living things and strawberries symbolized...a strawberry. A lifeless and eatable object with no real point to it. I picked it up, staring at the blood on the surface. For no reason that I am aware of(probably the mind of a child). I bit it. The taste of strawberry filled my mouth, mixing complexly with the metallic yet sweet taste of my blood. I chewed it and reflected.
Death comes in many ways, and even in various forms. People die everyday, it's nothing new and shocking. Why should someone be sad about death or fear it? Then it came to me; it's not death they are sad about or fear. It's the loss of someone that saddens them. It's the fear of being forgotten that goes with that sadness. Because at some point, when everyone who remembered you has died and been buried in the earth, you are forgotten. Essentially, that's all you are born to be: a memory to be forgotten. Tears had welled up in my eyes at this thought.
Was that my fate as well? To die, and have no one to remember I was here in the first place? I looked at Marvin with questioning and tear filled eyes but he said nothing. He simply took the towel off the table and pressed it to my finger. I noticed from my peripheral vision that my strawberry now stained red lay still on the table. When had I dropped it?
"Do you understand now?" Marvin's low, grave voice asked me.
"Yes," was the only simple reply I could muster with my voice cracking. But I went on regardless. "It's sad that is the fate of everything. That death is the fate of everything, and to be forgotten because of that death."
"There is nothing that can be done about it."
"I know," and with that, the conversation was over. A still picture in my mind. It was at that point, I realized what death was and everything that went with it. Ever since that moment, or series of moments, I have had an obsession with letting nothing be thrown away or forgotten. Weather it's a person an animal or even an object, I do not throw many things away. What did they do, to deserve to be forgotten?