Perplexing Impact

“Thanks to my thoughts, it still lives [the memory of the people they knew growing up]. You know there is no one alive who was grown up when I was a child. So I, as a child, am dead. Someday soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead- when I exist in no one's memory."

"I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that old person dies, the whole cluster dies too, vanishes from living memory. I wonder who that person will be me. Whose death will make me truly dead?”

Excerpt from Loves Executioner by Irvin D. Yalom, which has made a perplexing impact on me.