While recently thinking about the meaning of legacy and the impermanence of human life, I remembered the following unsettling quote from a favorite book, Irvin Yalom’s Creatures of a Day:

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“All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral—both memory and the object of memory. The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one and nowhere.”

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—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Passages assembled in Irvin D. Yalom’s Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy

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The idea that a person’s existence will be forgotten when the last person who knows them dies is a powerful reminder of the brevity of life and the importance of legacy. Living memory of an individual may extend across several generations; however, a memoir conceived and printed as a book can survive for centuries.

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This impermanence can motivate a desire to leave something meaningful behind—a legacy in whatever form—in order to be remembered long after life has ended. Personally, my instinct for curating and saving life’s objects originated from my own search for my birth family. Being adopted forged a need to discover, catalog, and treasure every piece of information I could find, no matter how small the scrap of paper or how seemingly insignificant the data point might appear. They were my treasures and, after a couple of decades, I was finally able to fill in (most) of the missing pieces of my family tree.

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Now, later in my life, I feel an urgency to organize and craft my life stories, lessons, and memory fragments into a printed memoir that can be shared: a written collection of the joys, struggles, accomplishments, and setbacks that I have experienced. Memoir can be a powerful vehicle not only for performing a life review, but also for leaving a beautifully crafted object behind—a voice that may continue to be heard across centuries.