Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
I wonder if, in days of old, we were as concerned about legacy and “leaving a mark” as we are now. I suppose, in a way, the obsession with sons and the family name is a type of that.
Donald Trump is an example of this trend, of this desperate desire to secure a legacy in the face of our mortality. It’s a tragedy that he doesn’t look to his children for that, but he’s not someone who really sees beyond his nose. He’s an empty vessel of a human being, and so thinks buildings, and not behaviours, are the legacy. In Trump’s mind, his name placed on this building or that one will ensure he’s remembered always. 1
He should have asked people who Guggenheim or Carnegie were before choosing that route. It’s not long after someone dies that their name turns into just a word. Even the villains of the world disappear from memory as time marches on.
In truth, most of us end up forgotten, at least the details of our lives, before a century has passed. Once everyone we once knew has also shuffled off, it is, in many ways, as though we never existed. 2
And yet…
What we do matters, who we are matters
My son is such a good person. He’s kind, generous, and has grace. He’s intelligent, passionate about things he loves, and makes good choices. People like him, they tell me so, often.
People leave interactions happier and feeling better about themselves after spending time with my son. That kind of impact has a nice outward ripple.
How we move about in this world, the things we do and the choices we make, those things linger in ways we can’t see or fully understand. My immortality isn’t going to be found on a building – though if one had to pick, it’d be a library – my legacy is in the people I inspire with my behaviours.
I’ll be lost to conscious memory a scant two generations after my death, but it’s my hope that the impact and example of my life, especially my affection for ethics and integrity, will linger on like the family tendency to interrupt, in my children and grandchildren and so on, until the world is a better place.
It’s okay if they lose the arrogance, as long as they hang onto the will of iron.
We can’t be blackmailed, not a bad legacy
There is another family trait that my son carries: we can’t be blackmailed. This comes from watching my mother try to resist the efforts at emotional blackmail aimed at her by my grandmother. This comes from having a mother who sometimes inadvertently tried it out on us.
My brothers and I learned that trying to placate blackmailers, emotional or otherwise, is a losing game, and my son learned and lives that truth as well. 3
It can take me a minute to find my feet when the source is someone I love, but I always get there. I don’t mind if that evidence of will, my unwillingness to bend to extortion, is my immortality. It’s a pretty good legacy, even if it doesn’t fit nicely on a plaque.
Ozaymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
- He’ll be remembered, but it will be his evil ways, taught in history books once the ugliness that is MAGA is consigned to the dustbin, that will linger in the memory like the smell of so many rotten eggs. And even then, time dims the memory. It’s that truth that allowed MAGA to rise.
The Venn diagram for Klan, Nazi, and MAGA is a circle, you know.
↩︎ - You can choose to have your ashes interred with a tree, in which case, you could live a very long time.
↩︎ - When my son was twelve, we were shopping at the mall when he asked if he could go to EB Games to buy himself a new, wireless headset for music and gaming, two passions. He was obsessed with headsets, with finding one that had the best sound, the best noise cancellation, and that he liked best, I suppose.
I had a moment there in the mall: I didn’t see the ‘need’ for another headset, notwithstanding the piles of books I accumulate for the same reason. But what we need is different, right? I asked if he wanted to maybe wait until after his band trip – need that spending money? I asked if he wanted to maybe wait and ask for another set of headphones for his birthday? I asked if he didn’t maybe have enough headsets?
He stopped walking and asked me why I was trying to make him feel bad about spending his own money on something he wanted to buy.
Busted.
I apologized, and we went directly to the game store.
I was so proud of him.
I didn’t behave in that way again, either. ↩︎
From Famine to Feast 
My wife was having an existential crisis this week. It was late one night, as they often are, and she was genuinely sitting there saying “What’s the point?” She was saying that we don’t know anything about our great-grandparents, so we too shall vanish into the night, as it were. But I pointed to our kids and said that they were the point. We give them a stable, solid upbringing to allow them to build their futures. Our legacy doesn’t necessarily carry our names, but each generation remembers the last. Being remembered with love seems fine to me.
LikeLike