Sonder (Noun): the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness
It would be easy to start this final column of the semester with a quirky quote from Hamilton about thinking of planting flowers in a garden in the face of death or not being able to determine who tells the story of your life once you pass. Yet, this implies a self-referential and egocentric view of the idea of a legacy, one I have already imposed in multiple past articles.
Instead, I want to take this idea, contort and reframe it through an external, omniscient lens. While we are the ones holding the pens of our own stories, it is important to highlight the factors that won’t make the final draft of our mental autobiographies.
Perfect examples of these hidden and unwritten facets include not where we are going but from whom we came; what footsteps do we follow in navigating our own crazy experiences? Who gave us our brown eyes, freckles scattered across our cheeks like constellations or the particular way we dance in an empty hallway? There has to be some explanation as to why we walk and talk the way we do, the way our traits mesh together like a jigsaw puzzle to present an entirely novel amalgamation.
This question is what I was researching when I stumbled upon a website where I could build my own family tree based off of found public records and data. Immediately, in my sleep-deprived haze while desperately trying to avoid pressing assignments on Canvas, I delved into my ancestry.
Some people were hard to track down and my maternal grandmother’s lineage seems to be missing altogether. However, I was able to work my way up from the roots and find a few faces that were vaguely familiar; many who resembled my mother, my father or even myself, though their identity has faded with time.
Somewhere between realizing I was descended from Charlemagne and then further registering that everyone with a European heritage is also descended from Charlemagne, I picked up on a nasty habit that I was developing through the research. Although I was presented with dozens of names, all of whom had some part in creating the person writing this article, I only looked further into those who had a picture attached to their dossier. Simply put, they felt insignificant to me if history did not provide an image with their persona.
How sad it is that these people, those that could share my nose or my gait, fell under my radar if their name was not accompanied by some kind of portrait. So many lives came and went for the world to spin exactly as it does with me sitting here typing some witty philosophical soliloquy on a cold December night. Yet, if they were not grand enough during life to be captured either by film or by an artist’s brush, I subconsciously saw them as unworthy of my time and effort to research further.
I can’t help but wonder if the same thing will happen to me when my descendants look back on their family’s history.
Logan Sindone ‘24 summarized these thoughts best after I went down a rabbit hole to try and uncover if I was legitimately related to the aforementioned Alexander Hamilton after finding a similar last name that was connected to my own. He said, “it feels like you want to find something that proves to yourself that you are great, that it is innate and in your blood.” While I want to argue with him, he is not wrong. My ultimate fear is becoming no more than a name that someone could find somewhere and say “yeah, they were my great-grandparent, I don’t know much more than that.”
It is ignorant of me to put a legacy into the tiny box of being known by my successors, even if it is just the difference between having and not having a picture with my death certificate and in my obituary. Each ancestor was a parent at one point, probably also a sibling alone based on the fact that people in the 1800s multiplied like Catholic rabbits, especially in rural areas like southern West Virginia.
They had loved ones who cared enough about them to report their passing in some way or another. They were hard workers who wanted their name to carry on somehow, yet I dismissed them outright as if their existence was dust in the wind. In no world should one person be the lone adjudicator on if someone is important or not.
A hunger for a legacy has driven people mad in the past, and who is to say I am different? A disregard for an “average” story proves that anyone can become a moniker on a paper with no further attributes. By striving to avoid this future, I am actively erasing the narratives of the people that prayed that their progeny would enter the world and make something of themselves. Those who dreamt of my success who did not even know me became white noise amongst my thirst to make an impact.
Over the past few weeks, I heard a song on TikTok that encapsulates these feelings. “O Superman” by Laurie Anderson, albeit haunting, is a tune that creators on the app have been placing under videos where they use a filter to see themselves aged 50 some years older than their current state. The lyrics “well, you don’t know me, but I know you,” put this cognitive dissonance of mine into perspective; my ancestors knew nothing of who and what they would create, but they had hope. Now, I know who they are but ignore their wishes to even think of my foundations if I do not perceive them as “great” in some way or another.
This ballad can also be applied in a different manner where I am on the other side of the equation. Whenever I grow old and become the person who decides whether I have made it big or not, I will know who my past self was and on what I based this calling. While I do not know my future self, they know me very well and if I will be proud of my journey.
Perhaps it will come with age and I will soon be accustomed to living a beautifully mundane life just as my ancestors did, but only the Laken looking back on this column in a decade can decide that. Only the Laken that knows who I am now, who I was as a child and who I will become after John Carroll has that power. Until then, the path forward looks like accepting life as it is, no matter how large my role is throughout my time. It is the art of understanding that your name can be nothing more than a census record, but hoping those after you will be kind enough to give your story a second glance rather than immediately marking you as forgettable.
