Ten years is a long time in the span of a human life.
It isn’t on a historical scale, but then people don’t live on historical scales. They live lives tightly bound by time, three score and ten if they’re lucky, more if they’re even luckier. The great achievement of the twentieth century wasn’t expanding the human lifetime – it was creating a world where more people hit that mark than ever before. This was always a fragile achievement, easily undone by the usual forces that drag our species down into darkness, but it was an achievement nonetheless.
But even so, it always comes to an end.
It’s been a decade now since my dad died. It feels like yesterday. It feels like a hundred years ago.
The world is a different place than it was. His grandchildren are grown now, all but one a college graduate and that last one rapidly approaching that mark. My mom has since passed away. There’s been a pandemic, an insurrection, and enough political stupidity to keep us in conversation for the next decade even if nothing else happened at all. The Eagles won the Super Bowl twice, something that he’d have enjoyed seeing. I sometimes wonder what he would have made of this world now.
I suspect he would have had some very definite opinions about it.
I do not claim to know what happens to us after we die, but if there is more to this than what we see I hope he is doing well and I hope he knows he is not forgotten.
It isn’t on a historical scale, but then people don’t live on historical scales. They live lives tightly bound by time, three score and ten if they’re lucky, more if they’re even luckier. The great achievement of the twentieth century wasn’t expanding the human lifetime – it was creating a world where more people hit that mark than ever before. This was always a fragile achievement, easily undone by the usual forces that drag our species down into darkness, but it was an achievement nonetheless.
But even so, it always comes to an end.
It’s been a decade now since my dad died. It feels like yesterday. It feels like a hundred years ago.
The world is a different place than it was. His grandchildren are grown now, all but one a college graduate and that last one rapidly approaching that mark. My mom has since passed away. There’s been a pandemic, an insurrection, and enough political stupidity to keep us in conversation for the next decade even if nothing else happened at all. The Eagles won the Super Bowl twice, something that he’d have enjoyed seeing. I sometimes wonder what he would have made of this world now.
I suspect he would have had some very definite opinions about it.
I do not claim to know what happens to us after we die, but if there is more to this than what we see I hope he is doing well and I hope he knows he is not forgotten.
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