Have you ever looked at pictures of your parents from the “before times”? Wondered who are those people smiling or sometimes not and consider those are your progenitors? They made you, raised you, made you, kept you warm at night, read you bedtime stories, told you the world wouldn’t fuck with you, made sure it stayed at bay, condoled you, and in the end, made it what you understand it to be today.

You sometimes think, that’s not who I am. I’m much more than the sum of my parts. I grew well past what I knew, I became…

What did you become? Did you become more than the world made you? Did you escape the slings and arrows to become more than your upbringing prepared you for? The expression, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones” rings out so often that parents cannot defend themselves once they aren’t here to rub the salve on those hurts.

Parents are people. That isn’t much more than a fact, it’s just a fiction that can’t be denied. We walk among gods because we make the world better for those that come after us. We make small changes in the fabric of the world hoping that one tiny fragment of what we do will be something, anything, better than what we had for ourselves. Nothing we do is for us, it’s for what comes after.

When the world forgets us, leaves us behind, the wind bellows behind the windmill of time and spins the world one more gesture we are forgotten and we are no more, yet, what we have left behind, the people we have made and the characters we have created, they, they make us alive. They remember us in the way they see fit. They create us again and again in the image of their memory. We are nothing more after that fact other than a misspent chapter in their life.

We are who we are. We take umbrage when we are forgotten when we are alive, we have no such luxury when we are dead. We have no appeal to fate and fortune and love. We cast our last breath when we said I love you and move on to something no one understands.

Parents never forget who they are. They understand that the world will never know them as well as their children. We hope that our children forgive us our trespass and remember our good deeds.