Us in Time for a Short Period; He Begat Me, I Begat Thee

Us in Time for a Short Period; He Begat Me, I Begat Thee (We in Time?)

    We only live so long. Some make it to one hundred years. They are few and far between. My uncle Harry made it to one hundred years-old; he was gone a couple months later. Most of us do not make it to the 90s. How much time do we need? All right, his spirit left, but his body was interred at the federal cemetery in central Pennsylvania. Next to his lifelong partner, my aunt, who passed 25 years prior. Perhaps she only made it to age 70.

    I just learned of a 52-year-old woman in Arkansas, the sister of a man that I met when we were children, a cousin to distant family of mine, who died in a car accident, maybe a week ago. She is buried now. Her life chapter is over. She lived a bit more than half a century. How long do we live?

    Whether it is 33 or 66, or more, we all will have only so much time to live. To make our marks.

    Adam and Eve lived 6,000 years ago? They lived very long lives, we believe.

    Perhaps so.

    Many of them back in the ancient Bible times lived hundreds and hundreds of years. Like Noah and Methusaleh, according to Genesis.

    Us now? Lucky to make sixty, for many. Others make their 70s and 80s.

    Like our family histories, meticulously kept and worked by us living. Some ancestors have a first name, a death date, a place of birth or death. Mere basic facts. So many of us are reduced to random or incomplete date. Better than a person who never was recorded at all, and perhaps not even given a marked grave.

    Millions of us in our shared families, some only a few generations ago, are mere foot notes, blips with no further information. Since the time of the print press, many people have larger footprints in our records, and now it seems the rise of the Internet many more of us are immortalized through all the things that have captured us in the data centers, servers, and the ether net Clouds or wherever our online lives and data is stored.

    Waxing nostalgic. Thinking of existence, types of permanence, or impermanence, or ephemerality. Our meaning and place in this world.

    We, as mere blips, while eking out our lives and meanings on this mortal plane. This is what we know, for now.

    What of me, and the millions who are not notorious, but we exist in this 21st century through the social media?

    What of all this blogging?

    What of my life, now longer than shorter. Made it more than halfway, pretty sure.