Letters from Awriterstip – Week 13
The Forgotten Dead...
Dear Readers,
There are things in life that wound us, but there are other things that wound us beyond life itself. One of them is the silence of being forgotten. I often think of this silence as more terrifying than death, more merciless than the grave, more cruel than any illness. Because death, at least, is a certainty.
But forgetting that is a choice. And it is the living who choose it.
People will tell you that a funeral is a holy thing, that it is where love gathers for one final bow.
But look closer.
Strip away the priest’s words, the flowers, the rehearsed lines of sympathy, and what is left? A ceremony, a performance, a convenient duty. A few tears, some polite nods, and the handing of a tissue. Then, afterwards, a meal to fill the stomach, a return to daily routines.
Within days, the world is back to its noise and chaos. The dead are no longer spoken of. The photographs are pushed aside. The memory grows weaker, as if the person who once laughed, cried, built, suffered, and loved has dissolved into thin air.
I have seen it with my own eyes. I remember my father’s month’s mind. The cemetery was in disarray. Grass had grown wild, tall enough to hide stones. Dust sat on the names of people who once walked proudly in life. I felt an ache in my chest that day. These were not just stones. These were men and women, fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, sons and daughters, above all, children. They were lives, with struggles and victories, with stories that once mattered. And yet there they lay, as if the world had already erased them.
I could not bear it. I put my own hands to work, brought labourers, and cleared the place. We cut the weeds, we washed the stones, we put flowers on every grave. For a short while, the cemetery looked alive, as if respect had returned. But then the thought struck me: how many families never come back? How many graves never feel the touch of care again after the funeral? How many names are never spoken aloud again?
This is the second death: the death of memory. The first is when the body stops breathing. The second is when those who once promised to love you stop remembering you.
But cruelty does not end there. Even in death, people’s whispers twist around greed. I have heard them. Maybe you have too. At funerals, after the prayers, after the tears, they lean close and ask:
Did he leave anything behind?
Did she write a will?
What about the property, the house, the money?
What did this person mean to us?
What love did they give us?
But what can I take from what is left?
It makes me wonder whether dying alone is better?
To slip quietly, without gathering the crowd of curious onlookers, without inviting the greed of relatives, without hosting the charade. Because when you look at it closely, what is a funeral?
It is a play, a staged act.
The actors wear black, shed rehearsed tears, and bow their heads for a moment.
Then the curtain falls, they take off their masks, and they walk away.
When I think of my own death, which may not be far, my health is failing, and I do not wish for such a stage. I do not wish for a grave overrun with weeds, for a stone that no one will polish, for footsteps that will never come back.
I wish to be cremated.
Burn me.
Scatter me.
Let the wind take me.
For at least then, I will not lie in silence waiting for a love that will never arrive.
I already know what people will say behind my back.
They will ask,
Did he leave anything for the children?
Did he leave wealth?
But they already know the answer.
There is nothing.
I have no empire, no chest of gold, no properties to fight over.
I have only my words.
Only my memories.
Only what love I gave in life.
And for most people, that is worthless.
This is the horror that we live in: that even cemeteries are mocked.
People laugh about the dead, make jokes about those who rest beneath the earth.
I remember it clearly, how some even spoke mockingly at the cemetery.
To mock the living is cruelty, but to mock the dead is something worse.
It is a crime of the soul.
The truth is, no one cares.
Cemeteries are forgotten because people are forgotten. Dust gathers because love has no caretaker. The stones rot because memory rots in the minds of those who once swore never to forget.
And the strangest part? Even those who love deeply, those who swear eternal devotion, even they are caught in the tide of forgetting. They mourn for days, perhaps for months. But time eats away at grief. Slowly, they go back to laughing, eating, planning, buying, selling, living. And the dead remain behind in silence.
Something is horrifying in this cycle. A man or woman may work all his or her life. They may raise a family, build a house, and give their youth to labour. But when they die, within a year, two years at most, there is a name carved on stone that no one visits. That is all. The weeds reclaim them. The birds forget their song.
So what is the meaning of it?
If even love dissolves in time, if even memory betrays us, then why pretend?
Why not admit the truth that death is not feared because of its pain, but because of its abandonment?
We do not fear the coffin.
We fear forgetting.
Sometimes I think about my own parents. I cannot go often to their niche now. My health keeps me away. And I know people will talk: He doesn’t even visit his parents’ graves. But I remember them in my own way. I carry their faces, their voices, their love inside me. I do not need weeds or dust or flowers to remind me. Yet even so, there is guilt.
Because what if memory, too, fades from me?
And so I write. I write these words like one would carve them into stone.
Perhaps one day, someone will read them and remember.
Perhaps one day, when even my name has been erased from lips, these words will whisper that I once lived, once loved, once suffered.
Because that is the final truth: the dead are not truly gone until the living stop speaking their names.
That is when the silence becomes eternal.
But look around.
Who speaks the names now?
Who keeps the memory alive?
The answer chills me.
Almost no one.
The cemeteries are overgrown.
The flowers have withered.
The prayers have ceased.
The dead lie in darkness, mocked by the world that once promised to love them.
And that, my friend, is more terrifying than death itself.
Until next time,
—Jacob M. / Awriterstip
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