Creating a Legacy

Once you have settled into your retirement plan, or your actual retirement or semi-retirement, there is one remaining important task of the later years.  That is to create, expand, and communicate your legacy. Obviously a will, healthcare power of attorney, and final wishes should be on that list.  And maybe even a draft obituary!

But legacy requires a bigger answer than that.  When you are gone, who will have the store of family stories and memories? How do you pass them on? What about your stuff?  What do you still want to do or accomplish that will influence the world around you once you are no longer present?  And how, in ways great or small, did you change the world for the better?

Let’s take up those items in no particular order.  Start with stuff.  It is really important to scale back the volume of stuff that your family or heirs have to take deal with. I know that well, having probated the states of my mother, my husband, and my best friend.  The first two were easy. The last involved no will, no immediate family other than eleven scattered cousins from Prince Edward Island to California, and house full of stuff.  You may live to be a hundred or be run over by a trailer truck tomorrow. Best not to procrastinate.  When I downsized our three-story house to a townhouse and cleaned out my “pack rat”: husband’s office and workshop, my children said, “thanks, Mom.”  It’ also a chance to give or promise things to family members or friends who will treasure them.  My middle daughter has already put in her request for the double bookcase build by her Dad (her sisters already have some of his pieces) and the desk that belonged to my great-great-grandfather, whose daughter marched for women’s suffrage.

What about the family stories and memories that you want to pass on so that your children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews and other survivors will be reminded of you and feel more aware of their place in the chain of humanity?  I am especially privileged to have a daughter who did the family genealogy and a mother and aunt who were great story tellers. One of my tasks for this year is to share those memories of my father with my half sister and her children. But I do regret not asking my aging family members to fill in some blanks in the stories of their lives.  I have no excuse.  My mother and her sister and my father’s sisters all lived well into their nineties. Don’t procrastinate. Ask them.  Particularly interesting is tracing passions, skills, gifts, and other characteristics. My great- great- grandmother was one of the few immigrants in my extensive New England family tree, a German whose occupation had been a washerwoman.  My aunt Marion, her great-grandchild, who died at 96, recalled her fondly and learned from her how to get any stain out of anything.  More common gifts helped me find why I, with little aptitude for art or music, raised an artist and a musician—we found the links scattered in both sides of the family tree.  I collected family stories, interspersed with pictures and dashes of genealogy, into a small bound volume called Stories for My Grandchildren.  My #3 granddaughter used to sit at the dining room table when she was very young and instead of asking me to read a story, she asked me to tell her another family story. Ask, listen, and share.

Finally, what footprints will you leave in the sands of time to guide or inspire those who follow? It does not require a Nobel prize or and Olympic medal.  This stage of life calls for two ways to leave a less concrete but perhaps more valuable legacy.  That legacy live on in those you cared for and/or mentored, in the communities and causes that you supported and served. Just think of the people who mentored and cared for you, who created and sustained the communities that nurtured you and worked for those goals and cases that you believed in, and ask yourself, what did I do in m lifetime to perpetuate those values, those skills, those communities, those noble goals? Keeping their memories alive in what you say and do will blend their legacy with yours. I kept the memory of my great-grandmother Alice Munger Stewart alive—she marched for women’s suffrage, I organized a local League of Women Voters and actively served at both the state and local level for most of the last 50 years.  So may people taught me how to be a teacher, a writer, facilitator, and I channel them all.  If you journal, or even if you don’t, take some time to write down the people to whom and for whom you are grateful and what gifts they gave you.. If you are still uncertain about your legacy, ask your friends, your relatives, or anyone else who knows you well.  Maybe even gather a group and tell each other what one another’s legacy is.

Legacy doesn’t take place over night.  As Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. Your life is the container of your legacy.  Spend some time identifying it, practicing it, and celebrating it.