The past is not dead so long as it is remembered. I have visited battlefields that have long since returned to quiet fields and ordinary farms, and that would be entirely forgotten were they not marked with plaques that allow us to remember how the place is haunted with the bones and silent suffering of long-dead men whose blood spilled on unholy ground sanctified nonetheless by historical memory, memorialized in books and movies, in documentaries and in maps where brave and dashing kids see rectangles and arrows and fill in the blanks in their own minds. In such places, it is necessary for plaques and old photographs to show the horrors that existed in such apparently peaceful places.

Some places need no such reminder. I have visited dark and humid slave forts along the coast of West Africa, and I need no plaques to feel the haunting of such places even hundreds of years later. It is obvious that such horrible places were the places where millions of people were penned up like animals and sold like cattle to cross an ocean in chains and horrible discomfort and mistreatment to a life of slavery for themselves and their children as far as the eye could see, completely cut off from home. Such evil seems to linger in some places long after it stops being committed.

We are haunted creatures. No matter how old we are or no matter how big we become, we can wake up in a fevered sweat due to a nightmare of something that happened decades ago. A single misguided and innocent touch can make us freeze in panic as if we are returned back at the horrors of our lives. The past never dies so long as it remains burned into our memories. That can be bad, when it is our traumas and living nightmares that become scarred in our minds, or it can be good memories that we feed off of long after they cease to be real, be it the never-forgotten glories of a homecoming queen or a high school QB whose dreams of the big-time were derailed by a knee injury or academic failures in college, or be it the antebellum plantation house or medieval castle that conjures up nostalgic memories of an imagined glorious past that was not nearly so glorious at the time.

We are not only haunted by experiences or by places, but we are haunted by people too. So long as we remember the music we loved when we were young, the people we loved or cared for or respected, they are forever frozen in time as they were. Those who do not share such memories are cut off from us, a different people because they are not haunted by the memories that drive our thoughts and reflections, as we ponder what was and what might have been. So long as we have the treasured memories of others inside of us, what we loved is not truly dead, but merely missing from the present, though still influencing it because we act on our memories even after that reality is long gone.

In moments of deep depression, many of us have dwelled on dark thoughts about how the world might be better off without us, and how we might be in an endless night without hope of a dawn of restoration and renewal. But even though we can (and all too often do) seek to obliterate our lives through self-destruction, we cannot obliterate the bittersweet memories of those we leave behind to piece through the shattered wreckage of a life and wonder what could or should have been done differently. Rather than taking our sorrow with us to the grave, all too often we simply spread our grief and suffering to others without feeling the warmth and care of the love they would have given us if they only know how to reach our guarded hearts. Instead of the promise of many more years and decades of fun and affection, we are left with ghostly memories of what could have been in a world a bit more cold and lonely in the absence of those whom we have loved.

There is much that is futile about life. We live for such short lives, but we are filled with such infinite longings that every life is a tragedy in an absurd world. We laugh and whistle past the graveyard, knowing all too well that someday, whether we choose it or not, death will come for us like it has come for every human being that has ever lived before us. And all we will leave behind are what people remember of us and our life’s work. Perhaps we will have friends or family that burn our private letters or hide our works behind the boards of a wall for embarrassment, or paint a false picture to give the world false memories of what we should have been instead of what we really were. And we will think that we knew people very well when all we knew was their flesh-like masks hiding deep and dark and tormented souls behind them, too afraid of the harsh light of day to be seen in the sun.

In the end, our memories, whether real or false, partial or complete, biased or balanced, personal or familial or cultural or organizational, are all we own in this world and all we leave behind to others. All of our works are castles built on clouds, but that can endure for centuries, nurtured in the passing down of our stories to generation after generation. And when we are forgotten, we are truly dead, as if we never were, into the oblivion that threatens us all unless someone else decides we are worth remembering. And we have no say in the manner. Even if we would write down our hopes and dreams and thoughts and feelings and lives on tablets of stone, or carved them on bronze and gold and buried them in sand or inside of caves, the day might come when no one could read those words, and so they would have no power to make others remember us as we portrayed ourselves, like the Etruscans and other peoples of old.

But we do have at least some power over what we remember, and if we choose, we can immortalize those whom we loved as best as we are able in poems and songs, in stories told to wide-eyed grandchildren, in novels and in history, and in glorious buildings like the Taj Mahal. And if we are lucky, those works will remain for others to be inspired by for many generations left to come, so that we will live in the way our ghosts inspire others to appreciate greatness even if they are too timid to reach for it themselves in their own lives. For as long as our words and music, our art and architecture, our stories and histories, our costumes and customs, or anything that we touch remains alive and remembered, we too still live in the hearts and minds of others long after we are gone. And so long as that memory is for the good, to nudge us all to be better people for having remembered some part of our past, then it will have been a life well-lived, no matter what suffering we endured, or how little we valued our own small contributions to the great world around us. Anyone worth remembering lived a worthy life, no matter whether they realized that or not. And we cannot make anyone else see that worth, only treasure it for ourselves and so keep the honored and beloved dead alive in our memories, just as we hope to be treasured by others in turn.