I am quite sure I have had a stroke (the final medical diagnosis is still pending), a small one I suppose, since I still drive a few weeks after my 93rd birthday. At this age, I must say that I do delight in people’s amazement when I tell them how old I am. But under all this is the knowledge that I am the oldest male on either side of my family, maternal or paternal, and I know I must go fairly soon. I just don’t like the idea.
from Don To Earth, Donald Crowdis’s blog
Go read his blog. He survived the 1917 Halifax Explosion (largest artificial explosion until the first atomic bomb test explosion), he was the first host of CBC Television’s The Nature of Things, he’s 93, he blogs, and he’s contemplating his own death. It strikes me forcefully, reading Don To Earth, how very lucky I am - we are - now to be slipping into an age when lives will be permanently recorded on blogs, on video, on audio.
I remember a pair of my great-grandparents and a great-grand-aunt from my childhood. The great grand-parents were from my mother’s side of the family but I’ve no idea which of my maternal grandparents was their child. Mine isn’t the sort of family to have kept those records and my parents were vague - suspiciously vague even - about their families. How fantastic it would be to go back to blogger, or the the Internet Archive, or something similar, to look them up and read their own words.
The traces people leave are often are so slight. Sometimes a parish record of a birth and a death, sometimes not even that, and often nothing at all left between of a lived life. Now that’s changing and Don’s an example of how valuable, individual and first-hand experences will be preserved - … and to prove / Our almost-instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is blogs.
