When a day passes, it seems as though it will never return. When a person dies, it is easy to consider that person gone. However, since time does not exist in a linear fashion in the mind, nothing ever dies if there remains a memory of it. Tayo, in Ceremony, is told that, "as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of the story we have together" (Silko 231). This statement is made to him with regard to some old Indian paintings that were washing away with the weather off of the clay on which they had been originally painted. These pieces of history will stay alive because someone is holding onto them. The girl reemphasizes this point of keeping what is important alive as she leaves, telling Tayo, "Remember,... remember everything" (Silko 235). This cry to remember the culture and heritage of a people is still heard today. It can be seen everywhere today, especially on the Internet. People use the Internet as a tool for passing along both an oral and written tradition so that it will not die. Also, in the stories of the victims of the Holocaust, the life of things already dead is evident. When Art asks Vladek about his late wife Anja, in Maus, Vladek exclaims, "Anja? What is to tell? Everywhere I look I'm seeing Anja..." (Spiegelman II,103). Although Anja had died many years earlier, she remained alive because Vladek held on to the memory of her. In Beloved, Sethe explains to her daughter Denver that she can never return to the place of slavery because it will be there always because she knows about it. Once something is in one's memory, it is still alive. Denver's curiosity and interest cause Sethe to explain how this can be:

"'...So, Denver, you can't never go there. Never. Because even though it's all over- over and done with- it's going to always be there waiting for you...'

Denver picked at her fingernails. 'If it's still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.'

Sethe looked right in Denver's face. 'Nothing ever does,' she said." (Morrison 36)

This is only true is there remains some memory of the person, place or event.

In the same way, if something alive is forgotten, it ceases to live. The memory has the control to let a person, object, or place live or die, whether it is alive or not. In Ceremony, Betonie and Tayo speak of the psychiatric hospital as a place where "they don't bury the dead, they keep them in rooms and talk to them" (Silko 123). Tayo, who spent time in this hospital says that "[he] was invisible...There were no voices and no dreams...," a place for the dead (Silko 123). Many events also die if no one remembers back to them. That is why the girl is so adamant about Tayo remembering all of the ceremonies and stories of their people. If he forgets them, as many Indians were beginning to do, they will all die. In Maus, Art experiences the death of his mother, not in a materialistic way, for that happened several years earlier, but in an even deeper sense: "After Anja died... these papers had too many memories. So I burned them... 'You murderer!'" (Spiegelman I,159). This was a second killing of Anja through the destroying of her journals about her life. Through her own memories, she was alive until Vladek destroyed them. Art also expresses a death of his own through his mother''s physical death: "You murdered me mommoy and you left me here to take the rap" (Speigelman I,103). The torture which he endured through her death was almost a death in itself.

In Beloved, deaths occur, not because that person has forgotten, but because a stronger, exterior force has failed to acknowledge the life of the person. The person, like Paul D, grows a tin box to replace his heart. Paul D expresses this loss of his life in relation to a rooster named Mister:

"Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you'd be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn't no way I'd ever be Paul D again, living or dead. Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub." (Morrison 72)

Paul D had lost something as important as his life, he had lost his being. This loss was common in slavery, it was a slow death that most slaves experienced. Many referred to it as being broken. Paul D tells of Halle, "It broke him Sethe" (Morrison 69). Baby Suggs also uses this terminology saying, "I'm all broke down" (Morrison 146). This death and loss of self is discussed by Virginia Hamner in Primo Levi's terms of the "drowned" and the "saved." Those who survived the concentration camps and the Holocaust were the "saved," no matter what methods they used to free themselves and survive. However, one could argue that even these individuals have drowned. These people are altered forever because of a slaveowner or a Nazi forgot that they were human. Memory can keep many things alive, but it only takes a few harsh people to kill the memory of a person, even if that person remains alive.