Machu Picchu. Stone Henge. The Nazca Lines. These places invoke mystery, the question of the unknown. When man built these huge, important and significant creations, the world understood the importance of these monuments.

Human nature being what it is, that is constantly evolving yet eternally static, I am sure when these things were conceptualized, planned, built and realized, there was talk, and more talk. What should they look like, who should build them, how to pay for them, how long will construction last? I am sure it was the subject of whatever the ancients had comparable to a town crier, to notices tacked to church doors, to newspapers and radio and television and the internet and Twitter and Facebook and electronic billboards and “Meet the Press”. Everyone knew about these monuments — I think we can safely assume they were debated and admired and used for the purposes they were intended, although now, thousands of years later, we are no longer sure what those purposes were.

It would be hard to believe, in this age of instant history, when each person does indeed get his 15 minutes of fame (and sometimes more, John and Kate, anyone?) that someday, down the road say 1,000 or 2,000 years, people would find the Statue of Liberty, or the Louvre, or Big Ben, and say Eureka! But what is it? Everyone knows the Statue of Liberty symbolizes freedom and welcomes those tired and poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the Louvre houses and shares some of the most important and educational art in history, Big Ben, well, tells time, on a major scale.

The forgotten things, these huge achievements, weren’t forgotten overnight. The people who built them certainly never forgot them, whether it was the leader whose idea it was to build them or the construction worker whose blood, sweat and tears built them, or the people who lived in and used these monuments for the purpose for which they were intended.

But they were, in fact forgotten. Each year, as people died, and new generations replaced the old, fewer and fewer people knew Machu Picchu as a thriving center of commerce and civilization, young people didn’t realize the significance of Stone Henge, kids in those days got tired of listening to how and why the lines were drawn in the South American Desert. They didn’t want to hear it from their parents, and so they certainly didn’t tell the same old tired tale to their children. Gone, forgotten, regardless of how well known they were in the prime time of their existence.

One day, the last person who knew exactly what Machu Picchu looked like at the height of its importance died, the last person who knew the story from last stone mason who worked on Stonehenge passed away, and then, those once mighty, reverent and important sites were just “that place over there,” I think it used to be a temple or something.

With passing time, it’s out of the mind.

With the death of my mother, I have pondered what knowledge went with her. Her wisdom, which my brother and sisters and I hope we have managed to capture; the fruits of her successes and mistakes; the lessons learned from her discretion, and the security of knowing there is one person who loves us above all, who we never have to doubt. This is life, this is what her mother taught her, what we teach our children and what they will pass on the generations in perpetuity.

The things I wonder about are the things she knew simply because she was alive in a certain time and place. The things she was taught as well as the things she learned as a result of being an intelligent, curious woman, ahead of her time in many ways and out of place in her attitudes. She was always willing to listen to anyone’s experiences simply because it was something she didn’t know, and so was something she wanted to learn about. Anything you learn is good, she always told us, from sewing on a button to driving a car, anything you learn is a good thing.

So she learned a lot. She learned history, she learned about literature and the Bible and music and food. And some of what she learned will go with her. She could recite Hiawatha, among lots of other poems, some beautiful, some sad, some moving, some ribald. She could tell you Bible stories as well as mythical stories from ancient Greece and Rome. She could trace the British monarchy from 1066 to the present.

But what she is taking that is completely irreplaceable are her songs. Not ones that she had written (although she could make up a ditty in seconds), but the ones she sang to us as far back as we can remember. I am one of the few people my age that knows ‘When Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ and ‘Strangers in the Night’ simply from having them sung to me from infancy.

Of course, those songs will not disappear for lack of my mother to sing them. The ones we will almost certainly never hear again are what we all called her eeewww songs, songs that are so bad and corny and sad and horrible that they have been all but forgotten.

My family no longer knows the titles of these songs, as my mother and my aunt are the only ones we ever heard sing them. When they would start these songs, we would ask them to please, please stop, that is horrible, its depressing, its too sad to believe, much less listen to.

There was one, an old folk song I think, about a man who carves his baby’s cradle with his own two hands, only to have to turn the cradle into a coffin when the child dies. There is a similar one about a young man who, if I am not mistaken, must build the coffin of his own true love. There are several about violent deaths, the motives as well as the aftermath. Death was a common theme, usually some irony thrown in for good measure.

But, my mother’s greatest musical hit had to be what we called (excuse me for my political incorrectness) ‘The Little Black Boy.’ The story the song tells is of a child who is shunned and ostracized due to his race, back in a time when such treatment was indeed the norm. I don’t know who wrote it or who recorded if indeed it was recorded. The main line I can remember from the song is sung in the dialect of the time and place, in the tradition of an old Negro spiritual. The child in the song is playing in his yard, and is lonely, as none of the other children will play with him, and his mother (or grandmother?) tells him to stay on your own side of the fence, don’ you mind what them white chile’s do.

It was, and still is, one of the saddest things I have ever heard. Mom could clear a room in seconds by just threatening to sing it. It could make me cry as a child and was guaranteed to bring chills to my skin, even when I was 40-plus years old and knew how corny it was. I have never heard anyone else, except my mother’s sister, sing that song, or even talk about it. I don’t know who wrote it or when, nothing.

It is one of the things that, like thousands and millions of songs throughout history, will no doubt just die, no one every remembering it. The last person to know it by heart will die, maybe that person was indeed my mother, and so it will go with them, another piece of human experience passed through time out of mind.

Gone. Like the knowledge of Machu Picchu and Stonehenge. Gone like the know how to build a shrine to an ancient god or the horrible art of hand-to-hand combat or how to fold a cloth diaper.

Like the memory of how my brother and sisters looked when we were born.

These things now pass down to history, and not everything in the human experience is important or interesting enough to be called history, and so is forgotten. I am sure the song about the little black boy will be one of those things.

With the death of every person, there is more loss than will ever be known. It is one of the few undeniable, universal truths. Our mother takes with her, her songs. We take from her our life and our hearts, and hers.