Not Vanishing

My central concern is that I will be forgotten.

I am afraid my name will stop being said aloud. I am afraid the people who knew me will not tell stories about me. I am afraid the work I do will be erased from records and memory. I am afraid the small kindnesses I offered will be unremembered.

I want my children to remember the way I laughed and the way I listened. I want my handwriting to be legible in a note someone keeps. I want the meals I cooked to be remembered by taste and by who sat at the table. I want the promises I made to be kept by those I trusted.

I do not ask for monuments or grand speeches. I ask for continuity: names spoken, faces recalled, habits repeated. I ask that my life leave a trace in ordinary acts so that forgetting is harder.

This is my concern, plain and exact: I do not want to vanish from the lives I touched.