A Eulogy

Late one night when I was staying with my grandmother last summer, I went exploring through her apartment after she fell asleep. I ended up in my grandfather’s study and found a collection of broken watches in one of the cabinets. One of the watches was a wind-up watch, missing a band. But strangely, though no one had wound it for years (and since I’ve had to wind it to start it working again) it was still ticking. I couldn’t change the time on it without opening the face, but somehow it was still keeping time, my grandfather’s time as I came to think of it. This is something I can’t explain, yet it resonated with me deeply.

I realized then and since that time, within the human heart, is not chronological, it is not synced with the minutes of daily life. The mind, our memory, is a time machine, blending the past with the present, and within it no one truly dies, no one truly ends. Loss is the thing that tears rifts in our lives the most. It brings about the melancholy that comes with the idea that it can never be regained. When my grandmother passed, the greatest tragedy was that I could no longer learn more of the person she was, the fathoms of spirit that made up her identity and the life she had led.

But what I remember is that legacy is not an empty word; that we are vessels of lives beyond ourselves, carrying within us the fragments of the people we have loved. Each of us possess the souls of those lost to us by death, and from each other we may continue to know them more deeply, to grow in our relationship with them. Through my mother, my aunts, through Nonnie’s family I can continue to love and know her. Through their stories and my stories, my children will know her, and so will my childen’s children. Death is frigid, unwavering, it always holds its gates. But the human spirit is fathomless and by it, by our legacies and the people we reach, we become eternal. My grandmother’s kindness, her dedication to other’s lives beyond her own, ensures her love beyond death. And feeling its effect within our own lives, to be able to become better people because of it, may lead us to one day forgive even time its unkindnesses.