The thing is, when people mourn the deceased, only part of the sadness comes from the loss of the person and all those intimate connections between them and the dead. The larger part - sometimes overwhelmingly so - comes from the loss of the potential future.

Time that could have been enjoyed together, experiences shared and special moments celebrated with them - none of it can ever happen once someone is gone forever.

It is why the death of a young one hurts so much more than the death of an elder, even if the latter could have touched so many more lifes.

We can never truly know the potential lost - the road of life ahead is shrouded in a mist of uncertainty. But all of us look towards the future with certain expectations - that the future will be populated by certain events that others have lived through before.

And we also look forward with hope. Unwavering hope that good things are to come for our loved ones, that life will be pleasant for them and that whatever plans they forge come to fruition.

How strong is that hope for the coming year? Or the next decade? Or a whole lifetime? What about the hope for the potential future of a whole civilization?

They called themselves ‘the final generation’, the ones that lived on this planet until a mere half-century ago. They lived in a world that had been poisoned by the refuse of a rapidly advancing civilization for so long, their bodies eventually rejected to carry the young to term.

Of course they did not give up at first. They tried so many things to mend themselves. And the more fruitless years went by, the more desperate their actions became. Wars even happened over the dwindling number of people of fertile age - pointless as they were.

Only in the bitter end, when it had become clear that the future of a civilization was lost, the remaining ones came together as the final generation. They began an attempt to repair the damages they had done to their world. And they compiled an obituary for their species that they sent out to the stars on superluminal messengers - a warning for other civilizations not to fall to the same mistakes.

They did not even know that anyone was out there. And they did not know that the humans would hear that message less than a year later.

It was a warning in time for that hitherto unknown species, as they were moving on the same path. Eager and thankful as they were, they rapidly developed the means to travel to the world of the dying civilization that had sent the warning.

It had only been five years until the humans arrived to offer their help, but the final generation had in the meantime shrunk to a handful of ten-thousands. Advancing age had taken some, others had gone by choice and yet others had been lost to recklessness in the face of despair.

The remaining ones refused help, having already mourned the loss of their potential future. Because even if the humans had managed to figure out how to cure the infertility, there were just not enough young ones left.

So the arrivals aided with other concerns and worked with the last generation to preserve their knowledge, demolish the abandoned cities and clean the sea and sky. Tasks that were pushed along by a rapidly growing workforce as more helpers kept coming in from their home world.

Though among those helpers were many that had not yet given up on saving the dying civilization, refusing to call the final generation that. It seemed utterly futile, as the last ones of the final generation aged past the point where they could even bear young.

Humans, always so stubborn - a trait you will find in many of them.

Eventually they found a way to make the physiology of their females compatible to gestate the young of another species. It was a fluke, actually. The result of an idea bordering on insanity and the resilience of their own biology.

The secret was no more as a call for volunteers went out. And no one expected how many would step up. There was not a single spot empty through all levels of the trials.

And in the remainders of the final generation, a tiny flicker of hope was reawakened.

It then was a frantic race to create the facilities and technologies necessary to begin the process that would take many years, intense work and selfless sacrifice. I cannot put into words the intense determination displayed by each and every volunteer, scientist, engineer and worker that had been part of it.

As the last ones of the final generation lay dying of age, the first ones of us to be born from human mothers were rushed to them.

The flicker of hope had turned into a blaze when two generations came together that were further separated than any other had been. As the final generation touched the hands of the first infants of their species they had ever seen, they glimpsed through their tears the promise of a new future and knew that their painful name now rang untrue.

We may not remember the people of our species that came before us, but we took our first steps on the same soil. We spoke our first words in the same language. And we grew up hearing the same stories.

My mother made sure I would live and learn the culture of my species and take the same roots as the ones that had come before, but of course I also grew up human - an experience I share with my generation.

For us, our worlds will now forever be intertwined through a parental bond that spans a divide that should biologically be impossible to cross. Humans are not only allies and friends, but our mothers and guardians.

Today, I get to see my children bear children themselves. I see our world so overflowing with life, that we have even carried it to a new one. Our people have a better outlook than they ever had before.

So today, thanks only to the stubbornness and compassion of those volunteers, we come together to merely mourn the loss of our people instead of the loss of the future of our civilization.