Dead Remember
“You’re not dead until everyone who remembers you is dead.”
Which I learned walking down a cracked side street in a central Mexican mountain town. Dogs ranged, cats darted, sheep grazed. Corncobs dried on at least one roof per block. The volcano we were set to climb the next day stood head and shoulders above us in the distance.
One of the people in the group gathered here to try and climb that volcano was the one who made this connection between memory and death. I inhaled audibly after he said it, the bolt going through me that does so when something strikes to my core. Oh, I exhaled. Oh.
Leaving a legacy is an armful. Something that requires years of effort and a hearty dose of luck. But a memory, that’s not a lift; I can leave that without even knowing it. That I can exist within the cells of another person is heady. It adds technicolor to the living I’m already doing.
The flip side is also true. It means I’m holding lives in my mind and my memory cells. Perhaps there’s a chance I’m the last one for someone, that my forgetting will mean they are gone.
When we turned around to head back to the lodge, roosters talked behind the stone walls of the houses we passed. We now faced Pico de Orizaba, the volcano with a glacier for a hat, where we would be the next day (weather and bodies willing). I could only see it through the filter of fears of what I was about to attempt.
Over the next twenty-four hours, the mountain would become a memory that set down deeper roots than that afternoon conversation on the sunny street.
Our brains hold on to the uncomfortable and the scary with such ease. With a pointedness, actually, in order to protect ourselves. Evolution was prudent to make sure we would be cautious of what hurt. So in a way, the not-dead-until-unremembered includes some pretty painful moments too. But the times we’d rather not remember are also the ones most likely to transform us into the next stage of what we’ll become.
When we remember, we’re holding alive within ourselves the parts that caused us pain but launched us into the orbits we currently occupy. We carry the turning points in vividness.
I don’t know if climbing this particular mountain was an inflection. Probably not in the same way articles are written about summit chasing or “I did it and now I’m hooked.” I liked it, loved it, hated it, wished it was over, and a kaleidoscope of feelings before, during and after the climb.
I’m not sure which moment’s memory will be the strongest. I don’t know what part of the mountain will live the longest within me. I don’t know what I will give a heartbeat by remembering.
That I will remember, though, is a certainty. That I will be remembered? Also likely at least for a little while.
And so the mountain and I will be scattered in the minds of others for a little while. There, in the folds of tissue, we won’t be touchable or definable or quantifiable.
But we will continue existing, alive in the memory.
Inspired by events on Citlaltépetl (Pico de Orizaba)
and the town of San Miguel Zoapan, Mexico.