All Your Heroes Are Dead

If you find this paper, then you should know I'm dead.

Maybe it was the last pandemic that did me in. Maybe it was the alien infestation. Maybe it was the rampant unrest when the governments began to fall.

I thought I had all the answers back when the tremors began. I was a man of logic and sense, and I watched the news with a sense of obliviousness. That can't happen. There are people out there who won't let this happen. I may not have any power, but someone will act. Good people will act.

For any future generations that survive to read this, never let this mantra rule the day. It leads to inaction which is the fatal flaw of every well-meaning person who flirts with the idea of going against the grain. Collective inaction is what destroys civilizations. I know this because I watched my neighbors, one by one, stop watching the news each night. They turned to the rumor mill, word of mouth, and conspiracy theories. They thought the Machine was trying to control their lives, and they would have none of that.

Maybe we needed to be controlled.

Maybe we would have survived if someone had taken control of the ship we were driving into the sinkhole in the middle of the ocean.

And there may be no survivors. I don't know yet. This planet may just be the greatest ship ever to go down in the universe.

I saw my little girl board a spaceship bound for a new existence. Maybe she'll help colonize the next planet. Maybe in a few years she'll still remember my face and wonder, "What happened to that man?"

I won't see her get married. I won't see her children. I won't even see how she ages and becomes a woman.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make this a goodbye letter. I should have written to her when I had the chance. But it's too late. The ship's not coming back.

I shouldn't cry. She got off the sinking ship and got onto the lifeboat. She won't see this sad planet breath its last before it plummets below the waves.

I wish I had been a better father.

I wish I had been a better husband.

I wish I had been a better human.

I think we all wish we had been better. All of us who are left tried our best. And the heroes—they were the first to go. The good ones always go first. It's like a law of nature.

I watched my wife go to work every day as a nurse during the global pandemic. The virus circulated until she was sitting in just the same room as some of her patients had. I wasn't even able to hold her hand as she took her final breath. She was a good woman, the best, but she was gone as easily as a candle flame in a storm.

I didn't even get to bury her. They burned her body and sent her ashes back in a plastic bag. But by then I knew the world was falling apart. The last world war had started, and I had been glad that I was too old to be drafted. I tried to tell myself I would be a better father than I would be a soldier anyway.

You don't notice the world breaking to pieces at first. You think it's just a glitch, a happenstance, until the casualties and disasters start a running tally. You become numb to the newest instances of mass death. And eventually you start tuning out the bad and just try to keep hold of the threads of good.

My little girl asked me who was coming to save earth. I didn't know what to tell her. She had seen superheroes on screens save the day, stop wars with a shield, pummel the aliens into submission.

I couldn't tell her the truth—that no one was coming to be the miracle of the hour. That was a daydream left to better times and looser attention spans. Survival made us all hungry for some scrap of hope, but we weren't fools either. We were aware enough to scent the destruction on the air, like a pack of animals sensing an earthquake before it hits.

All I did was take her hand and kiss it. "Daddy's here," I said, "and I'll never let anything happen to you."

The last thing I did was to sell my house and use the money to buy her a ticket on the ship that was leaving earth. I gave her the heart-shaped locket her mother had worn and told her to look at our pictures inside whenever she was too afraid to sleep. I don't know if she understood, but she let me put the chain around her neck.

I want her to remember me, but I hope the memories of us aren't a burden. I would hate for her to live with survivor's guilt.

When it came time for her to go, I kissed her forehead. She was still so little, barely up to my thigh, yet she tried so hard not to cry from the way her lips trembled.

"I'll be a good girl," she said, and those are probably the last words I'll remember as I lay on my death bed, whenever that may come.

And now my story is with you, the one reading this, the one who is living in a world that is still surviving.

Don't be like me, selfish and bitter and full of regrets.

Be the hero of this world, if you can.

Save what you can.

Love while you can.

And the rest—well, it's not easy, but things need to be done.

The existence of tomorrow rests on your shoulders.