Where does a life go?

I had intended my next post to be much more frivolous in nature but...meh, sometimes the id wants to come out and play.

Someday I shall be very old and very tired and possibly even content enough to move onto the next great adventure. But...I don't think I'll want to leave my life behind. I'm working hard to cultivate it, make it interesting, loving, fun, worthwhile. Can't I take it with me when I go? The descendants can have my stuff but I don't think I'll trust them with the life I worked so hard on.

When the owner of the life departs, who's left to steward said life? The knowledge, ideas, fun and LIFE of eighty or ninety years and the mind and soul in charge of them has just left. Where does that leave all the living that happened to that person between birth and death?

For example: I sometimes wonder where in space and time is my childhood. Although it is technically gone--dead I suppose. It often comes back to me quite vibrantly through memories, photographs, cherished toys, childish diary entries. It comes back even stronger when I encounter "friends of my youth" and we are able to layer and harmonize our individual memories into something richer, deeper, more alive. Because me, my memories, the photographs, and the memories of others still exist in the here and now my childhood does not seem lost. But in a hundred or a thousand years when everything remotely connected to that childhood is forgotten dust...then will it be gone? Will it be as if those sunshiney bicycle and Care bear filled days of the nineteen-eighties never were?

And this is only a small part of the greater question: When a life is gone where does it go? I don't mean where goes the soul of the departed I'm convinced that the soul at least will return to God it's home. But the life: from chubby beloved infant to beaming mischivous child to young adult full of plans and finally on to the man or woman fulfilling (or not) the early promise and plans and hopes. Where go the loves, the hates, the everyday mundane?

If every moment of the life was recorded: written down, video taped, put into oral history would that particular life somehow be less gone? If no one remembers is it the same as if it never was?

If a tree falls in a forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

If you could download the passing person's memories and experiences into a database would the life at least live?

It just seems a waste to live and enjoy a lovely life and then for it just to vanish because no one's around to keep that life alive.

I don't know. I suppose I think the life lives on in God's memory. Much more secure than a database. Perhaps the life is attached to our souls and just moves into heaven with us. I suppose I'm just stuck between the very tangible NOW and the decidedly ephemreal PAST. But only a moment ago the PAST was NOW and solid.

But where does a life go?