So it goes

It’s been more than a month and a half since I received a text message in the Indiana Memorial Union that simply read, “Vonnegut died.” When it happened, I suddenly felt that my frantic scrambling to finish my political theory term paper in the next two hours was a mistake of priorities.\nI’m far from alone in being hugely affected by Vonnegut’s writing. Countless readers from the 1950s onward have embraced his sardonic views on the world, making him inarguably one of the greatest writers of our time. And yet with hardly any mention of him after the week he died, he’s already on the way out of our memory.\nShameful as it is, Vonnegut’s forgotten memory is indicative of a much greater trend: Larger-than-life figures pass away, and canons on the person’s life and interviews with remaining family members fill network prime time slots. Then we move on.\nThe trend was clearest Monday, when America celebrated Memorial Day with a sunny afternoon of cheap beer and skyrocketing sales of Oscar Meyer franks. The etymology of “memorial” stems from “memory,” but almost no one recounts actual memories of those who served in our armed forces.\nIt’s not a bad commentary, just an objective statement: We move on. But to what extent can we simply “move on” without acknowledging the societal contributions of Vonnegut or our veterans? Furthermore, how do we avoid tarnishing the memories of such figures?\nRemembering isn’t really an issue for the very close friends and family of those who die. Their remembrance is a given, and it’s usually a painful one at that. What’s more interesting is how individuals who weren’t in such close social proximity to the deceased react.\nAnd whether it’s that kid who sat next to you in biology that died in a car wreck, your elderly neighbor across the street or a favorite author, it holds true that life goes on undisturbed. There’s certainly nothing wrong with continuing on your daily schedule. You still go to the game, still play subpar beer pong after that game and still wake up the next morning wishing as you trudge to class that you had enough money to move past Natty Ice.\nSo it goes.\nReturning to Vonnegut, there’s no doubt in my mind the IU campus stopped a moment to take a very genuine “Oh, that’s awful. Wow. He was so good.” But then we continued on to class, or our cigarette break or our term paper.\nOftentimes, the only way to cope with tragedy is to move on, and that’s fine. But what’s not fine is to let our mourning period be decided by how long Larry King is running eulogies over a person on prime time. We shouldn’t remember because we’re told to do so by the media. And we shouldn’t just drop a vastly influential figure from memory because it’s been a week since the person died.\nEspecially not Kurt Vonnegut.