A World Remembering Scars

I finished THE FAULT IN OUR STARS by John Green (another AMAZING author) and I'm going to admit that I cried. I find it hard to believe that anyone can read that book without crying. That book was seriously one of the most heart wrenching books I've ever read.

I knew what was coming when I started to read it, but still it had a way of making me...feel. I felt the pain with Hazel and Augustus, and even though I didn't want to feel that pain, I read on and felt it anyway; realizing all along that even though this book is fiction it has some truth in it.

It made me accept the truth and that is still the hardest part. Oblivion is inevitable. Someday, everything and everyone I know will just simply end. And I can't help but just feel erased from a place that I was so much a part of.

BUT.

Yes there is a but. But at the end of the book, the pain settles, and I think it's because Hazel is wrong. Well she's right, but she's still wrong... Let me explain.

Yes, everything and everyone I was ever attached to will be gone someday, but I'd like to think that it won't matter so much because I'll be gone too. I remember Hazel saying something along the lines of no one can live in a person's memory forever because those people will die too. However, memories can turn into stories and stories can be passed on.

It may not matter that no one remembers who Shakespeare's muse was for Sonnet Fifty-five, because Shakespeare remembered, and he wrote it down, and that Sonnet carries his memory for him. That person is forever embedded into the words Shakespeare wrote even if they did not contain a name. As long as Shakespeare cared enough to write, Sonnet Fifty-five is all that mattered to that person.

Perhaps the most important thing that a person leaves behind is the bond of another. They may not leave a mark on everyone in this world, but that is okay because those marks are more often "scars." It does not matter how many people you touch so much as the way you make them feel. In this crazy world we remember more hideous names than beautiful ones, so rarely we remember the people that were gentle enough not to scar the world. We remember names like Hitler, or Stalin, or Saddam Hussein, and less people remember the names of the beautiful gentle souls like Anne Frank or Harriet Tubman.

So I've decided that when I die, I don't want people to just remember my name, or what I've done but I want them to remember how I made them feel. And when their memories wear thin, I can settle and watch the world pass knowing that I did not scar the world by trying to make one grand difference in a desperate attempt of remembrance, but I slowly impacted the world by impacting one person in a beautifully gentle way.