The way of all flesh . . .

And unknown things would happen, and sooner or later I would die, too -- I understood that now, clearly, the way you suddenly become aware of the sky and the diving board after the person in front of you has jumped -- and my kids perhaps would see me off as I had seen my parents off, or perhaps not. And soon all the people who had accompanied me through life would be gone, too, and then even the people who had known us, and no one would remain on earth who had ever seen us, and those descended from us perhaps would know stories about us, perhaps once in a while they would pass by buildings where we had lived and they would mention that we had lived there. And then the stories would fade, and our graves would go unattended, and the graves of those who had attended ours would go unattended, and no one would guess what it had been like to wake before dawn in our breath-warmed bedrooms as the radiators clanked and or wives and husbands and children slept. And we would move to the nearer regions of the dead who are remembered into the farther regions of the forgotten, and on past those, into a space as white and big as the sky replicated forever. And all that would remain would be the love bravely expressed, and the moment when you danced and your heart danced with you.

Family, Ian Frazier 1994