What Remains of You

One day, almost everything we believe to be ours disappears. The house passes into other hands, objects lose the names of those who owned them, photographs fade, and even the words we write may cease to be read.

But something remains.

What remains is the way you made someone feel when they were alone. The words you offered at precisely the right moment. The gesture of tenderness you may have forgotten, but which someone else carried with them. The courage you awakened in another person. The listening that kept someone from giving up. The love you taught without even realising that you were teaching it.

We do not remain only in other people’s memories. We also remain in the way they come to see the world after knowing us. We remain in the choices they make, in the kindness they pass on, in what they learned to endure and in what they finally decided they would no longer accept.

Perhaps this is our truest legacy: not the monuments we build so that we may be remembered, but the small transformations we leave in those whose lives have crossed our own.

What remains of you in others is what truly remains of you.

So live in such a way that your passage through this world does not become an unnecessary wound. May those who meet you carry away a little more hope, freedom and humanity.

In the end, perhaps that is all we are: what continued to live in others after we were no longer there.