"Legacies"

A number of our friends have been busy this past spring updating their wills, along with all the angst that accompanying that task: trying to make sure that what they have accumulated continues to go ‘where’ and to do ‘what’ they wish it to. We ‘baby boomers’, it seems, don’t want to give up control even in death. We want to ensure that ‘our’ assets go to ‘our’ family or tribe, with little or no thought to those who have no expectations of ever receiving anything from anybody. When you live in a world that expects everyone to look out for themselves and denigrates those who for various reasons can’t, this is entirely normal.

The more I thought about the legacies that I have received, the more I came to realize that those legacies that really counted I couldn't put a dollar value on or include in a will.

I never met my maternal Grandmother. But as a Barnardo child, orphaned at a young age, she came to Canada with her siblings, suffered through the death of a sister and her fiance, went out to the prairies as a companion-housekeeper, married there and raised a family. My grandmother was a feminist in the prairies, in the early 1900’s, when one of the few books she had managed to obtain for her daughter was ‘Sowing Seeds in Danny’ by Nelly McClung. She felt that education for women was so important that she saved her ‘butter money’ in order that her only daughter, my mother, could leave the homestead and go into a nearby town for teacher training. Her legacies to me were the belief that education is important for girls and the knowledge that no matter what happens in your life, there are always options.. 

My father was a garage mechanic, with a Grade 10 education. He was hard-working. honest, and good at his trade. What I remember most about him though are the Christmases [the only day of the year that he, as a garage owner, ever closed the business] when he would cheerfully go out into cold and snowy weather, often leaving his Christmas dinner cooling on the plate, to rescue someone who was stuck in a snow bank, had run out of gas on some distant back road; or couldn't get their car started to go to a holiday gathering. His legacy to me was the belief he lived out, that what is most important is helping others however and whenever we can

Many other people have left me legacies as well; legacies of hope, of courage, of faith, as well as legacies of ingratitude, of bias, and of narcissism.

And so I ponder just what my legacy will be…..