There was a grave just closed. Not one seemed near,
To pay the tribute of one long—last tear!
How very desolate must that one be,
Whose more than grave has not a memory!

And then will come the day when the last person who remembers me will die.

Those long remembered can alone claim to be long forgotten.

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.

Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.

The death of someone with whom a person has been long and closely associated leaves a literal vacuum in that person’s life,

To be suddenly alone when all you have ever known is connection. To be alone in the dark while you felt the distant pieces of yourself decay.

Is that the minds last, soundless, dying cry? Who will remember? There is no rustling of old crowds as my long, wrenching, joyous voyage ended, only the question, "Who will remember?"

The person who's vanished is the one you really think about.

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

A dreary sense of loneliness came over him as he realized how everything he had brought with him from home and from the old days seemed to fall away from him and let him go his own way, forgotten and forsaken. The door to the past was barred, and he stood outside, empty-handed and alone; whatever he needed and desired he must win for himself — new friends and new shelter, new affections and new memories.

He is dead who called me into being, and when I shall be no more the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.

And yet in no time they disappear, / perhaps to reappear in a dream… / But now they are dead, / deleted without having lived / because each man exists just for himself / and when he dies (did he live?) nobody knows / that once he breathed. (From: The Poetry of Menotti Lerro, p. 49)

Remembrance is the life of grief; his grave,
Forgetfulness.