Legacy

In a more naive world view so one could think about all the lives they affected. From school cafeteria clerks to intermittent study groups. Before dismissal. In a more practical lens, once one dies, so who cares what is left and remembered?

Legacy is drenched in an individualist redemptive contemplation. To find some comfort that you still “exist” in some capacity, or that you at least existed in however much longer our Earthen narrative persists. But what if you were to remove the individual?

Upon death bed, what if there were no more memories of a life? If you remove the mind from the equation, what is left? Well, one could look at breathing. Heartbeat and twitching. One can only hear the rhythmic beeps indicative there’s still something persisting. Perhaps an automatic grimace with the nurse suggesting convenience store sushi.

Indeed, though the individual no longer exists in this body, so there is evidence of encodings still twiddling about. And these encodings surely aren’t universal: they’re distinct per family.

If you remove the mind of the grandfather and the grandchild, and each looks upon sushi, so they grimace in unison. Surgically unbind each vein and tendon til a flay in the wind, and it’ll still hold the same impulses in each prompt.

In our animated illusions so this is the most rigid, dispersing the smokes and mirrors of an individual’s mind. Whatever fragments you argue yourself to be, well, they all return and are carried through descendants. Perhaps one day you’ll be revived, mannerisms and all, if your descendants make it to the end. Though if you terminate here, well, it’s all an illusion, isn’t it?