You've Got Three Generations

You've got about three generations.

Four, maybe, if you're lucky.

That's about how long you have before the people who actually knew you are gone.

Not knew of you. Not recognized your name in an old picture or heard a story about something you once did. I mean people who knew what your laugh sounded like. What made you mad. Things that set your soul on fire. The things you worried about that nobody else knew you worried about.

People who knew you.

Three generations.

There is something incredibly grounding about it.

A hundred years from now, there's a pretty good chance strangers will live in your home.

Stranger than strangers... likely, they haven't even been born yet.

They'll walk through your kitchen without knowing where your table sat. They'll paint over the wall you spent three weekends getting exactly right. They'll stand in the room where you celebrated birthdays, opened Christmas presents, fought with someone you loved, apologized, laughed until your stomach hurt, cried when nobody was looking and spent some enormous percentage of your life.

And they'll make completely different memories there.

Their home.

Their stories.

Their life.

There’s something a little sad about it when you actually say it out loud. But more than anything, I find it incredibly clarifying.

Because we spend an awful lot of our lives wrapped up in things that feel enormous while we're standing inside them.

What somebody said. What somebody thinks. The thing we haven't accomplished yet. The money we haven't made. The mistake we can't quit replaying. The argument we need to win. The person we're trying to impress. The version of our life we somehow decided we're supposed to have by now.

And yet, three or four generations from now, there may not be anyone alive who even knows enough about us to know we cared.

That's some seriously grounding shit.

It doesn't make me want to care less about my life.

It makes me question what deserves so much of it.

Because there's another side to this that I can't quite shake.

People might forget our words. Eventually, they may even forget our name... but I don't think they forget how we made them feel. Maybe they don't even know where that feeling came from anymore.

That's not some happy-ass motivational poster shit. In my bones, I believe that's simply human.

Someone can grow up feeling deeply loved because the person loving them learned it from someone before them. They can become generous because generosity was normal in their home. They can believe in themselves because somebody once believed in the person who taught them to.

They may never know where any of it started.

That's kind of incredible.

The smallest parts of us might travel farther than our name ever will.

But there's something else about this whole three-generation idea that's been bothering me.

If that's really the window we get—if that's roughly how long it takes for a life to move from memory, to stories, and eventually just history—then I suppose the same thing has to happen to the things we live through. Even the really big things.

September 11, 2001 was twenty-five years ago today.

Twenty-five years.

I was there for September 11, 2001.

Not New York there. Not Pentagon there. Not Pennsylvania there.

But alive there.

I remember where I was. I remember the confusion. I remember watching the second plane hit. I remember a television being rolled into a classroom because that's how we watched breaking news then. I remember driving. I remember the radio. I remember going to work later that day and discovering that every American flag in Home Depot had sold out.

I remember what the day felt like.

Sixty years earlier, there was another morning Americans would never forget.

December 7, 1941.  Pearl Harbor.

I know Pearl Harbor.

But I don't remember Pearl Harbor.

If I'm being completely truthful, most December 7ths pass without me giving the date the reverence I probably wish I did.

I know what happened. I know the magnitude of the loss. I know what it meant for our country and what followed.

But I inherited all of that.

There isn't a single memory attached to it that belongs to me.

The first image was hard to find. Hard to look at. Hard to remember.

The next one wasn't so much. I knew exactly what I was looking at, but there's an emotional distance between the photograph and me that simply wasn't there with the first one.

That's difficult to admit.

Maybe I lie to myself a little about why.

Pearl Harbor was nearly 85 years ago.  It happened on an island thousands of miles from the mainland of the United States... all during a time when the world itself was truly much larger. No internet. No videos appearing instantly in everyone's hand. Most Americans experienced Pearl Harbor through radio reports, newspapers and photographs that arrived later.

Or maybe that's just what happens.

Maybe three generations happened.

And if that's true, I have to wonder what September 11 will feel like 60 years from now.

Because 9/11 was different in ways I desperately want to believe will matter.

It happened in front of me.

I watched it live.  We watched it live.  My generation did.

There were cameras everywhere. There are thousands upon thousands of photographs and videos. We can still hear the phone calls. We can watch firefighters walking into buildings they knew everyone else was trying desperately to escape.

The world was becoming smaller, and September 11 was captured from seemingly every direction.

Surely that gives it a longer memory... at least that's what I want to believe.

Because I know there will eventually be a generation that knows September 11 exactly the way I know December 7.

They'll know the date.

They'll know the buildings.

They'll know the numbers.

They'll know what happened.

But they won't remember.

And for the first time, I think I understand how different those two things are.

Maybe that's where our three generations matter most.

We can't give someone our memories. But we can give them what those memories did to us.

We can tell them what mattered.

We can tell them about the fear and the loss, certainly. Nearly 3,000 people left home that morning without any idea that they were living the final hours of their lives.

But we can also tell them about the people who ran toward danger.

The strangers who helped strangers.

The families who waited.

The people who gave their lives trying to save someone else's.

The flags that couldn't stay on store shelves.

Maybe, somewhere in all of that, we can pass along a little bit of what September 11 felt like after there is nobody left who actually felt it.

Twenty-five years really isn't that long. Neither, really, is a lifetime.

Eighty years. Ninety if we're lucky. Three generations... four, maybe.

Whatever we get—even if it's 25—that's the lifetime.

That's not much time to spend worrying about shit that won't matter. Holding onto things that don't deserve us. Trying to win things nobody will remember we won.

Whatever amount of time it is, though, it's a hell of a lot of time to love somebody. To make someone feel like they matter. To give more than we take. To leave something in another person that might somehow outlive our name.

Today, twenty-five years after September 11, I hope remembrance is one of those things.

I hope this day somehow gets more generations than we do.