WHO ARE YOU? REALLY??

Life bristles with ironies. Sometimes life is the irony. Consider how video-cams, iPhones, and Clouds pledge to permanently store and treasure everything we ever say or do. And yet we're losing treasures every day. Our last WWI veteran died this year...WWII veterans are dying by the hundreds every day...and what about all those lives now and forever missing in our lives?

They were the cast members in the great drama of our life who have now left the stage. Never again to be seen, only remembered. More of a loss than we may have at first realized. Think of it!  For instance, Mom will never again be able to answer those little questions you forgot to ask. About the night of your conception...her pregnancy...the important moments teaching you how to speak...the aunts and teachers about whom only she could have explained their remarkable roles in your childhood.

All those moments, those insights, those secrets now remain forever sealed with her. Just now when you could learn so much from their details. We probably know more about such matters in the heavily   biographied lives of Roosevelt, Church, Hitler and Lennon than we do about ourselves. There's something enormously dissatisfying about that.

We've been advised [warned?] that soon we can be implanted with a chip that will record everything we do, say, and hear throughout a lifetime. A kind of bequest to our children who may, after the wake, wish to sort out who we really were. My question: Why should they know when I still don't...?

Or to put the question in historic context -- is it time the wunderkind from Silicon Valley reconsider the lofty mantra: "If the mountain is there it must be climbed!"