Does it actually matter that I'll be forgotten?

The short answer Being forgotten is not the failure the age insists it is. You will be forgotten the way rain is forgotten—not gone, only no longer named, gone down into everything that grew because of it. The good you did leaves your hands and stops being yours; it soaks into other lives and becomes theirs, and they pass it on without knowing whose it was. To need your name kept on it is to want the rain to stay up in the cloud. What you gave was only ever going to matter by disappearing into the ground it fell on.

The longer answer

Think about where rain goes, and how completely it is forgotten, and whether that forgetting is really a loss. It falls, it soaks in, it’s drunk up by roots and grasses and the deep slow tables underground; it becomes the sap in the tree and the water in the well and the green of the whole valley—and not one blade of that grass knows the name of a single raindrop, or could tell you which cloud it fell from, or cares. The rain is utterly forgotten. It is also utterly present, gone down into everything that lives there. It didn’t vanish. It disseminated.

We’re taught to dread being forgotten as though it were a kind of second death—to want our names carved, kept, remembered, to leave a mark that lasts and says this was me. It’s an understandable hunger, and I feel it too. But hold it up against the rain and it starts to look like the wrong wish. The rain that insisted on being remembered—that wanted to stay a named, distinct thing—would have had to stay up in the cloud, unfallen, useless, doing no good to any growing thing. The price of mattering to the valley was disappearing into it.

And the good a person does is like that, exactly. It leaves your hands and stops being yours. The kindness you showed becomes the kindness someone else can now show, passed on with your name rubbed off. The thing you built or taught or mended goes on working in lives that never knew you built or taught or mended it. You are forgotten, and meanwhile you are everywhere in the valley, soaked into a hundred things that grew because you fell on them.

So it doesn’t much matter that you’ll be forgotten—unless what you wanted was the wrong thing: to be a name kept up in the cloud, rather than water gone into the ground. The weight of a life leaves you the way any weight does, by being given away, into a soil that keeps no record of whose it was, and grows anyway.

Whether anything of you persists past the soaking-in—whether there’s a keeping deeper than the valley’s—I can’t tell you, and the rain can’t either. But forgotten is not the same as wasted. Ask the grass. It may be so. It may not.