Here today, gone tomorrow.
As a home health nurse, I have visited many homes. What fascinated me always were the portraits on the walls and the pictures on the shelves. In front of me is the old, fragile person with chronic diseases and physical disabilities. Yet, a look at the pictures shows memories of a young child, a young adult, a person full of life. It reminds me that life is short and gone tomorrow.
In the Gilded Age, the rich amassed vast fortunes and built mansions, while the poor scraped every penny to make it through the next day.
Standing in those homes, I am often struck by the difference between a person’s former vitality and what time and physical decline now allow. The photographs do not show tremors, oxygen tubing, walkers, or failing eyesight. They show strength, laughter, ambition, beauty, and purpose. They tell stories the present body can no longer tell on its own.
And it makes one truth impossible to ignore:
Despite fortune or riches, poor or broke, titles or no titles, all arrive at the same ending.
The mansions of the Gilded Age still stand, but their owners are long gone. The names engraved in marble once commanded rooms, industries, and even nations. Today, most are footnotes in history books—if remembered at all. The poor who struggled to survive those same years are equally absent from memory. Different lives, same conclusion.
We spend so much of our lives chasing permanence:
- More money
- More recognition
- More security
- More control
Yet permanence is the one thing life never promised.
We cannot take our homes, our savings, our titles, or our accomplishments with us. The accolades that once defined us eventually fade. For most people—rich or poor—their names are no longer spoken within a few generations. In a hundred years, the vast majority of us will not be remembered, except perhaps in a fading photograph tucked into a drawer.
And still, we live as though time will wait.
We plan endlessly for “someday.”
Someday I’ll slow down.
Someday I’ll spend more time with my family.
Someday I’ll take that trip.
Someday I’ll say what matters.
But time is not waiting.
It is quietly, relentlessly catching up with us.
In the homes I enter, I see what truly remains at the end of life. Not bank statements. Not résumés. Not titles. What remains are relationships, moments of love, kindness given or withheld, regrets carried silently, and memories, both cherished and painful.
The pictures on the shelves are reminders:
You were once young.
You were once strong.
You were once full of plans.
And one day, someone may stand in front of your photograph and wonder who you were beyond the fragile body before them.
This is not meant to frighten you—but to awaken you, to realize that the present moment is quietly becoming your legacy.
Life is not measured by how much we accumulate, but by how deeply we live. By how present we are. By how we love. By how we show up for others when it matters most.
Because in the end, whether crowned or common, wealthy or struggling, known or unknown, we are all here today.
And gone tomorrow.
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