It is how it goes. Realistically, the living must "move on".

My late 2nd wife found this to be terrible to contemplate too, and all the more so because she knew her days were numbered. As her husband, I was one of five people who seemed to care whether she lived or died. And the other four were elderly. She knew that we five were the fragile receptacles of her memory and that when we are all gone, she would "be no more".

And indeed, two of we five are gone already, just 11 years later. I remarried, and I honestly don't think of her each and every day anymore myself, much as I loved her. It's just not the way life works. And she wouldn't want me pining for her endlessly. Well -- maybe some selfish little corner of her would, but not her as a person.

But I wish she could have been a fly on the wall of her own funeral. A couple hundred people showed up, some of them from hundreds of miles away, many, many of whom hadn't been in touch or talked to her in 25 years but remembered her from high school or college and wanted to pay homage to the outsize impact she had on them in their formative years, before her illness took her largely out of the game.

We don't fully know, and tend to discount, the breadth and depth of the impact we have on others and the world around us. Usually, it seems like farting into the wind. But ... it leaks out every now and again. In the post for example that my daughter put on her FB page of me holding her newborn daughter recently, and how it was for her a window into how I once held her as an infant.

People don't talk much about the profoundly symbolic and portentous influences we sometimes have upon them. But it's there.

Of course, even for all that, a few decades after we're gone, no one will specifically remember and remark upon us. But we'll still have had an impact, and that will be true no matter who bears witness or doesn't.

Sorry about your schoolmate. I think it is good that you let it "hit home," and I think that it is tragic we so often become desensitized to it. And I think it cannot be completely separated from the theism vs. atheism question. For example, the thought: "My schoolmate died AND there exists a God" is a very awesome thought (to me, at least), while "My schoolmate died AND there does not exist a God" is also a very awesome thought (to me), but in a different way. Peace.