I have a hazy memory of a trip my family made when I was a very young child, perhaps 6 or 7 years old. We were crossing the Nevada desert in our old Titan motor home. For some reason we stopped in front of an old, forgotten cemetery, at least five hundred miles from nowhere.
I don’t remember there being a town around - I think it may have been on the outskirts of an old deserted ghost town, that even the ghosts had long since abandoned.
As I glanced around the cemetery, I observed a certain old tombstone. I can no longer recall what it looked like, except that it was worn out. I don’t remember if it was stone or wood… Just that it was small and weatherworn to the point of being illegible, or at least soon to be.
No great monument this. It did not stand out for its grandeur or for its age… there were others much older. No doubt it was nothing special even when it was first placed into the fresh earth so many decades earlier. It was just old and insignificant. Mainly it just felt… forgotten.
It moved me deeply. Someone had lived a life, created memories, made friends and perhaps enemies. He may have once been married or even had a family. A thousand stories… but what remained? Nothing. Only this marker remained, and barely that.
Unvisited and long neglected, I wondered when he was last remembered. How long since any part of his life had crossed a mortal mind? When was his name last spoken by human voice? Those who knew him had likely long since cleared out and moved far away. Perhaps everyone on the earth who ever knew him had a forgotten stone of his or her own.
I’ll never know the story of that man. He was born, lived, and died – almost certainly leaving nothing of his story behind.
It saddened me.
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