Your Last Rememberer Is Dying

The glass of water sits untouched beside the hospital bed, and two pills lie on the small table. The old woman’s hands tremble as she wipes her eyes again and again. Tonight, the last person who will remember you is dying. She knows that with her death, an entire world will vanish—a world with no photographs, no videos, no written records. Only thousands of scenes, scents, voices, and touches that she has hidden inside her mind.

When a person dies, we say a life has ended. But what actually happens is far more devastating. Among the millions of memories stored in their mind, some are known to no one else on earth—those special moments, those feelings that only one person knew. With their death, they disappear forever, as if they never existed at all.

Now, the old woman sees an afternoon from fifty years ago floating before her eyes. Her friend Lily laughed and said, “You know what? I’m never getting married. I’ll get a dog, and I’ll go to bookstores every day.” That conversation, that laughter, that afternoon sunlight—only she holds them now. Lily died twenty years ago. She left no children and no diary. So, Lily’s dream survives only here.

Indeed, every person is a library—not of books but of experiences. Thousands of stories, thousands of faces, thousands of voices sit on those shelves. Consequently, when someone dies, it’s like an entire library burning down.

Through the hospital window, she can see the evening sky. She remembers her childhood friend Simon. He died thirty years ago. He had no family, and no one kept any photos. Therefore, she is the only person on earth who knows how Simon laughed, how he angered, what his voice sounded like.

Of course, human memory is a strange thing. It holds so much that’s written nowhere else: the way someone walks, the color of their eyes when sunlight hits them, the way their face shifts when they smell their favorite food. Ultimately, these things are what a person really is.

Right now, she holds the feeling of her grandmother’s touch. Her grandmother’s hands were soft but firm. While cooking, her grandmother would hum a little tune. No book or recording holds that song. In a few hours, when she dies, that song will be lost too, forever.

After all, death isn’t just the end of a body; a world goes dark. All the countless moments, feelings, and scenes stored in each person’s mind disappear with their death. And when that person is the last one who remembers someone else, two deaths happen at once.

In the stillness of night, only machine sounds echo through the hospital corridor. Her eyes are closed. Meanwhile, inside her mind, faces and voices still drift: her friend Susan’s laughter, her grandfather’s cough, the look in her first love’s eyes. She alone witnesses all of this.

This catastrophe happens silently.

No one knows about this invisible disaster. No newspaper will report it, and no one will grieve in public. With an old woman’s death, an entire era, an entire world will quietly disappear. That world has no name and no address. It existed only in one person’s memory.

Finally, the glass of cold water remains untouched on the table. Light falls on the blister pack’s silver foil. The monitor beeps once and stills. The rest belongs to silence.