The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot

by Marianne Cronin

“I didn’t ask how you came to be alive, I asked why. Why do you exist at all? Why are you alive? What is your life for?” “I don’t know.” “I think the same is true of dying. We can’t know why you are dying in the same way that we can’t know why you are living. Living and dying are both complete mysteries, and you can’t know either until you have done both.”

Somewhere, out in the world, are the people who touched us, or loved us, or ran from us. In that way we will live on. If you go to the places we have been, you might meet someone who passed us once in a corridor but forgot us before we were even gone. We are in the back of hundreds of people’s photographs—moving, talking, blurring into the background of a picture two strangers have framed on their living room mantelpiece. And in that way, we will live on too. But it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to have been a particle in the great extant of existence. I want, we want, more. We want for people to know us, to know our story, to know who we are and who we will be. And after we’ve gone, to know who we were.

“I could never travel anywhere by myself,” she said. “I’m not brave.” “Neither am I!” She looked at me, staring so searchingly that I looked away. “Lenni,” she said softly, “you’re the bravest person I know.” “Why?” “You just are,” she said, and the moment fell between us. “Dying isn’t brave,” I said, “it’s accidental. I’m not brave, I’m just not dead yet.”