Please Forget About These Parts Of Me When I Die

When I'm gone, please forget how I ate peanut butter.

Not the fact that I ate it, but the specific way—standing at the kitchen counter, spoon diving directly into the jar, each scoop slightly larger than the one before. 

Forget the time I cried during the commercial with the sad dog looking for a home.

Not because I'm embarrassed by the emotion—keep that part if you want—but because I wasn't actually crying about the dog. I was crying about an email I'd received two hours earlier that made me feel irrelevant and old. I didn't correct your assumption. I let you comfort me for the wrong sadness.

Forget the mean thing I said about your sister/mother/friend/haircut.

The one that made your eyes widen slightly before you pretended I hadn't said it. The one I immediately regretted but was too proud to take back. The one that revealed more about my own insecurities than your sister/mother/friend/haircut. 

Forget how desperately I wanted to be liked.

The way I'd subtly shape-shift in different company—more intellectual with some friends, more profane with others. And the laugh I manufactured for jokes I didn't find funny. 

Forget my browser history.

Ignore how many times I googled my own name. The exes I looked up at 2 AM. The WebMD symptom checks that convinced me I was dying on a semi-weekly basis. These digital breadcrumbs track a path through my insecurities that nobody needs to follow after I'm gone.

Forget how many times I started diets on Mondays.

The identical optimism each time, like someone with amnesia encountering the same situation for the first time. The way I'd announce it casually, as if this wasn't the seventeenth identical declaration this year. The kitchen purges, the special purchases, the meal plans abandoned by Wednesday afternoon. 

Forget my self-deprecation that was actually fishing for compliments.

When I said my first draft of that presentation was terrible, I wanted you to contradict me. When I claimed to look old/fat/tired, I was setting up your reassurance. This manipulative modesty doesn't deserve to outlive me. It was small and needy and beneath the person I wanted to be.

Forget how I sometimes pretended not to see you in the grocery store.

I simply didn't have the emotional bandwidth for small talk. And so I'd suddenly become fascinated by nutrition labels or produce selection to avoid eye contact. I wasn't busy or distracted—I was hiding behind bananas because I couldn't bear to answer "How are you?" with anything other than "Fine" when I wasn't fine.

Forget how I judged parents before becoming one.

The silent, smug assessments of tantrums in grocery stores, the internal eye-rolls at children watching tablets in restaurants. "My kids will never..." was a sentence I completed hundreds of times before having a child who proved me wrong in hundreds of ways. 

Forget how I sometimes pretended to be busy.

The "Sorry, can't make it, swamped with work" texts sent while in a blanket cocoon on my couch. The fake “I think I’m coming down with something” that I'd reference, to avoid events that required pants with buttons or conversations that couldn't be paused with a remote control. 

Forget the fights I picked when I was actually upset about something entirely different.

How I'd criticize things like loading the dishwasher, when I was really angry about feeling unseen. This emotional ventriloquism was unfair to everyone involved, myself included. It solved nothing and confused everything.

Forget my ability to remember trivial slights for decades while forgetting important anniversaries.

How I could recall verbatim something hurtful you said in 2006 but couldn't remember to buy milk. 

But here's what makes this complicated…

In asking you to forget these things, I've ensured you'll remember them. 

By cataloging my hoped-for omissions, I've guaranteed their inclusion in whatever memorial you construct. 

But maybe that's the point. 

Maybe, just maybe, I want to be remembered whole—not just as the camera-ready me, but the complete, contradictory mess of a person I actually was. 

After all, those embarrassing, mundane, unflattering things are what made me specifically me. And not a generic collection of virtues suitable for engraving.

So remember it all, if you want.

The peanut butter rituals. The fake laughs. The hiding behind produce.

Remember the person who contained multitudes of small hypocrisies and mundane failures… alongside whatever goodness you choose to preserve. 

I won't be around to be embarrassed anyway.

And there's something strangely comforting about being known—truly, completely known—even if it's only after I'm gone.

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