Legacy — “Kherrūwidūn”
I’m trying something new for me. Rather than write about Kherrūwidūn, I thought I’d try my hand at recording a video. As I’m fairly new to this kind of “content”, I hope you’ll forgive me if it takes some time to get a text version uploaded (transcript is now below the video—12 Sep, 23)
Please let me know in the comments what you’d like your Legacy to be.
As always, be well Gentle Reader
Gryph
Legacy (#Kherrūwidūn) is more than material; it's the wisdom and love we pass down.
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about Legacy, what it means to me, and, in an odd way, what Society tends to tell us it's supposed to mean.
I think most of us grew up only hearing about Legacy in terms of people of privilege; rich people had a legacy that they were passing on to their children, or they saw their children as the Legacy that they were leaving for future generations to experience. We hear about businesses creating a legacy before they even released their first product. It got me to thinking about what my legacy is and what it means to me.
Some of you will know—if you've been following my page or my Instagram for some time—that I lost my beloved Marmaduke earlier this year. I was lucky enough to spend the first 57 years of my life with this woman who was my mom, learning from her, having her as my number one cheerleader, and always supporting every decision that I made. That's not to say that she agreed with every decision I ever made; she was quite critical of some of the things that I decided to do in my 20s. But, she always supported my right to make those decisions, and then supported me further when the obvious consequences of some of those decisions smacked me in the face, and let me know I had made a bad decision.
She never responded with “I told you that would happen…” She'd always say “Well…this is what happens when you don't make good decisions so what is it that we can now do to resolve the problem?” Anyway, I was appointed the executor of Marm's will. Which meant I had to make funeral arrangements, I had to make sure that her estate, such as it is, was distributed appropriately, and also make sure that any specific bequests she had made in her will were followed to the letter. As it happens her spouse survived her and so he automatically gets everything from her estate—so that was one thing I didn't have to worry about. But, it still involved quite a bit of me talking to the banks, and talking back and forth to lawyers, and talking to the long-term care home that she was in for the last three years of her life.
When all is said and done, all I have left as a legacy from Marmaduke is her ashes and a necklace of Cleopatra that she wore all of her life. I can't remember a time when she didn't wear this necklace. This is actually the second Cleopatra necklace that she had; the first one was made of such soft gold that after three decades of wearing it around her neck the bust had turned into this amorphous blob that couldn't be recognized anymore, so she went out and bought herself a new Cleopatra necklace that she wore for the last, probably, two decades of her life. That's all I have of hers; I don't have any of her books, or her photo albums, or the sketches that she did when she was a young mother, or any of the physical things that you would normally associate with Legacy.
But I think what I do have of hers is far more valuable; I have 57 years of wisdom from this woman. This woman who taught me that all life is precious, that the only way to honour the lives that other people lead is to meet them where they're at, and to uplift them whenever possible without compromising my own values. She taught me the wonder of discovery and an absolutely voracious appetite for reading and for learning things. She's the first person that ever said to me “A day when you've learned something is a day that you haven't wasted.” I look back on everything that she's taught me, and realise that's what I want my legacy to be. I don't have children of my own; my husband and I don't have children because by the time it became possible for us to do so in Canada, that time had passed us by. But, we do have a large collection of nieces and nephews. If I was to leave them with anything I would want to leave them with a similar sense of wonder, and discovery, and honouring the lives that other people in their lives lead. I'd want to give them the knowledge and the tools that they need in order to live fulfilling lives themselves.
So…as I close this out, I have one question for you: what is your legacy? What are you going to leave to your loved ones, your children if you have them, your family of choice? What are they going to remember you by? Is it the things you leave behind, or is it the ideas, and the drives, and the passions that you've shown them you have?
Let me know in the comments; love to be able to communicate back and forth with you.
Thanks.
