I wonder how many people I've kept alive that way?
No; I'm not a doctor or a paramedic or a healer or a psychiatrist. I am not involved in people's health, other than my own, in any way, shape, or form. And I probably wouldn't know what to do faced with a situation where someone's life needed to be saved by me, although I do know CPR and I don't panic easily.
So I probably wouldn't know what to do in 80 or 85% of situations that might arise.
But that's neither here nor there. Loraine and I were watching something a couple of weeks ago and the show contained a line that's really stuck with me. One character was having an encounter with the ghost of another (yes, we watch weird stuff). The ghost thanked his friend for being there for him, both while he was living and after he passed away, and he expressed his sentiment with the line that's stuck with me--
“People die twice. Once, when they draw their last breath, and again when people stop thinking about them”.
I don't know why the line hit me the way it did, but I've thought about it quite a bit in the past ten or so days. And the more I think about it, the more I come to believe it's true. As I get older (and trust me, despite my best efforts I AM getting older) I think about things like the legacy you leave and how (and how long) people will remember you after you're gone. I'm well aware that everyone physically dies at some point, but are they ever really, truly gone as long as they're still around in our collective consciousness?
And I think that's one of the reasons why the line from the show stuck with me. In my role as History Jim I've brought the stories of people, perhaps long forgotten by many, back into that collective consciousness. I mean, I did it because they had interesting stories to tell, and I thought they were stories about which people should know. There are so many stories out there that have been lost to time, and the people behind them forgotten. If I can do my part to help keep one or two of them alive, at least in a story sense...well, that's the least I can do.
The line from the show stuck with me for many reasons. And a tale like this is just one of them--
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