I don’t need to know anything about you to know that at some point in your life, you’ve changed a small detail about a place to leave one message behind: “I was here.”
Maybe you’ve left a pinecone at a bus stop or a row of seashells at the beach. Maybe you’ve built a snowman in a corner of your favorite park or placed a pebble on a stranger’s gravestone.
Perhaps you’ve even dared to leave a more permanent mark by carving your name on your desk or dragging your finger in wet cement.
You might have taken a sharp blade to the bark of a young tree, enclosing your initials and your sweetheart’s in a heart. As the tree grew, your message grew with it.
The world is very different now compared to how it used to be 100,000 years ago. But some human trials have stood the test of time: through the years, we’ve struggled with confronting our mortality. One way we try to cope with that is by leaving a piece of ourselves behind.
Evidence of the first human handprints dates back to hundreds of thousands of years ago. When the earliest writing systems hadn’t been established yet, humans found another way of leaving a mark distinctly theirs. A handprint is one of the most personal messages. Palm to palm, we shake hands, we pray, we high-five.
Our obsession with our hands has never left us.
The last two weeks of summer were busy ones for us incoming resident assistants. After five days of intensive training, our last task was to pick a spot on the East campus graffiti wall and paint a picture representing our QuadX connection. To welcome incoming freshmen, Edens quad, my team, painted a tree. Its leaves were our handprints. We all went home with green hands.
We weren’t the only ones. Chains of handprints appeared in the murals of most quads and orientation groups that evening.
Throughout orientation week, our drawings were painted over by other artists. They were replaced by tags and political messages. But the echo in the tunnel didn’t change. Generations of students spoke the same words from each layer of paint: “Here I am.” “This is my mark.” “Remember me.”
“What will be your legacy?”
This was the second essay prompt to a project I did in high school. I didn’t know what to write. I hadn’t thought about it yet.
And it’s not an easy thing to think about. Reflecting on our legacy means confronting the fact that some day our existence will come to an end.
Throughout time and culture, religion has been used as a means of coming to terms with death.
But not everyone has felt that burden lifted. In fact, accepting our death is one of the things we as a species have made the least progress on. Some even argue that modern times have made us go backwards.
To some extent, our fear of death is innate. As animals, we have a strong instinct for survival. We feel a physiological urge to continue our bloodline.
But that’s not our only worry. We want to make our stories indelible. We don’t want to disappear.
Having children is one way that we choose to leave a piece of ourselves behind. By passing down our ideas and our belongings, we try to outlast our bodies.
Mothers leave their daughters their wedding rings. Fathers leave their eldest sons their collections of baseball cards. Grandmothers leave their granddaughters their favorite sewing kits. Grandfathers leave their grandsons their favorite smoking pipes.
Even here at Duke, we are often told that we should want to leave something behind — that we should want to make a difference in the world.
Greatness surrounds us. From world leaders to Nobel Prize winners, all sorts of notable people have graduated from Duke. We are offered several pathways to glory. We could build a corporation empire, develop a prototype for a new technology or discover a cure for cancer. No one would forget our names.
But maybe what matters day to day is not whether the world knows our names. That’s a futile goal if it’s pursued for its own sake. Fame can make it difficult to form meaningful relationships — and life’s too short to waste time forming hollow ones. What some don’t realize is that we don’t have to do something grand or leave some physical token behind to be remembered.
And we shouldn’t only want to be remembered after we pass away. Oftentimes, Life pulls us apart from our loved ones for reasons other than death. By carving ourselves a space in others’ memories, we shall be remembered not only after our lives, but during them.
I said goodbye to my first BFF when I was eleven and my family moved to England. I then said goodbye to my two closest friends when I was seventeen and my family moved to the States. Again, I said goodbye to my high school best friend when we went to different colleges. And next year, I’ll have to say goodbye to my rowing team if I choose to go study in Berlin.
Sure, goodbye doesn’t have to be forever. But a lot of times it’s for a long time. And a lot of times, “a long time” is long enough to grow apart.
What we’re sometimes left wondering is whether “a long time” is long enough for them to forget about us.
“Do you remember me?”
I ask this often when I’m scrolling through old pictures. Two best friends in a frame: We look inseparable. Now that we’re distant from each other, I wonder if there’s still something holding us together. I wonder if I still have a space in your heart.
Just as we’d like to be remembered after death, we’d like to be thought of while we’re still alive. And this doesn’t just apply to the friends we made in school. We’d like our favorite high school teacher to still think about the lessons they taught us. We’d like our fellow camp counselors to still think about the summer we spent together. We’d like our exes to be reminded of us when they’re walking in the rain.
How can we pursue this? Increasing the chances that someone remembers us is relatively simple. We just need to make a difference in their lives. We need to matter to them.
Lending others grace can look like many things. We might help a freshman carry his grocery bags home from Whole Foods. We might listen to our friend vent about the professor she doesn’t like. We might say “thank you” to our TAs after everyone else has rushed out of office hours after hounding them for answers without saying a word of appreciation.
Often, a small favor goes a long way. Accumulated over time, being graceful to those around helps us form the strongest relationships.
What lies beyond death is out of our hands, regardless of what marks we try to make — instead, we should focus on making a difference while we’re still here. Similarly, what lies outside our world is out of our control — we should focus on making a difference in our communities.
Even after the Blackwell bench was painted over last year, the handprints of past students still pulsed under the new layer of paint — their spirits were conserved beyond their palms. What mattered was how they contributed to making their dorm a home.
Sure, you could leave a mark with a sharpie on the door of a bathroom stall.
But there’s a better place to leave a mark: Your loved ones’ hearts.
Anna Garziera is a Trinity sophomore. Her pieces typically run on alternate Tuesdays.
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