--Dara Horn, American novelist
I wish I could eavesdrop at my own funeral.
Yup, I know that's kind of morbid. And no, I'm not planning on exiting this
mortal plane anytime soon. God willing I've still got lots of life left in me
at 57.
Yet what a revelation it would be to listen in, as the
people who love and know me while I live on this earth, one day in the future
gather together and talk about the person I was. The life I led in the years I
was given by my God. I wonder what they'll say, what I'll be remembered for,
what my legacy will be.
Legacy. That's what
every single human being leaves behind in death: paupers and princes, the
famous and the infamous, the anonymous and the big shot. Legacy is the spiritual echo of our limited
time on planet earth. We all will depart to some "undiscovered
country", in the words of William Shakespeare, but even in our ending, we will
leave a wake in the sea of human existence.
Some ripple that moves outward, declaring, "He was here. She was
here."
The world will be different, changed, for one soul having
lived.
This week the New York
Times reported on the legacy of a woman named Sylvia Bloom, a 96 year old
you'd never expect to leave some great legacy. Bloom actually died in 2016,
having worked as a legal secretary at a New
York city law firm for 67 years. That is a noteworthy legacy if only for
longevity. But other than her employment record, Bloom lived an ordinary
life. Born in Brooklyn
to immigrant parents, she grew up in the Depression, married a city firefighter,
had no children and lived a modest life in a tidy rent-controlled
apartment. Nothing out of the ordinary,
nothing to merit more than a short obituary in the back pages of the newspaper.
Yet Bloom left behind a great fortune, $9 million, all steadily
saved and invested over years and years and years, by a quiet soul who most
days got to work by way of a city bus. The
real legacy is what Bloom did with her money. She bequeathed $8.2 million of it
to charity, more than $6 million to the Henry Street Settlement, a Lower East
side of Manhattan
social service agency, founded in 1893.
Their historic mission is to serve the underserved: the poor, children
at risk, seniors, the homeless, domestic abuse survivors and the unemployed.
The kind of folks we might imagine won't have much of a legacy because of the
hardness of life for them. Unless someone helps, like Bloom, with her
legacy. Her gift will underwrite college
scholarships for needy students, for a very long, long, long time.
Now that's a legacy.
Most of us won't come close to leaving behind such a
generous gift as Bloom's. We won't be
remembered as a best selling author or a politician who served with honor or a
celebrity whose star shone so bright.
Yet each day you and I are accumulating a legacy, the legacy of our one
life.
It is built in small increments, in acts of kindness and
decency, in living with integrity, in being a faithful spouse, a loving Mom or
Dad, a loyal employee, a trusted friend, a welcoming neighbor, or an engaged
citizen. It's being created in the
causes that we support with our time, in the ways we make this world better: by
having faith in God, or coaching a kid's Little League team, or standing up for
the powerless, or being so grateful that we generously make our financial gifts
to places like Henry Street Settlement.
All these tiny acts of goodness add up to the legacy of a really
good life.
Or not. Legacies cut
both ways. So we might also be remembered for the grudges that we held or the
folks we did not stand by in fidelity, or the hard heartedness with which we
lived, or our greed in keeping everything to ourselves and for ourselves. We
imagine we win because we had the most toys. At our passing we could be
recalled as cynical or faithless, ruthless or mean, self-centered or self-indulgent.
Legacy is finally up to each of us. It grows daily in how live
and move through this precious God-given life. Legacy teaches us that although
we can't take it with us, we can leave behind goodness and a world made better
because we lived. The choice is ours'.
How will we be remembered?
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