Your Personal Legacies
If you could write your own obituary, what would you say? Would you limit yourself to the basic facts about family members, occupation, accomplishments, and affiliations? Or would you also comment on your values and what mattered to you?
Many people are now writing the equivalent of an obituary. It is called an ethical will. In contrast to the cold legalese of the formal document through which one disposes of property, a living will is a personal message to loved ones. It may explain why the person made certain monetary bequests to individuals and charities and how those gifts reflect values and relationships. This assures that the person’s intentions are fully understood. The author of the living may also reflect on life, perhaps stating core religious beliefs or setting forth the principles that guided important decisions. If the author has any personal regrets and wants to make amends, or perhaps to reach out to an alienated family member, the living will can make sure that nothing helpful is left unsaid.
Some individuals, wanting to leave a more extensive story of their life, write an autobiography and have it self-published. While this might seem like excessive vanity, it can be very educational for future generations, not only in understanding their roots but also in appreciating what it was like to have lived at a certain period of history. If their forebear accumulated a fortune and passed on significant portions to them, it is important for heirs to understand how that wealth was created and how it was intended to be used. By discussing various crises and challenges, the author can import valuable lessons learned. Sometimes these autobiographies include an appendix listing family genealogies, which may prompt visitation of sites which figured prominently in family history.
An alternative to a written autobiography is a video narration. While being filmed, the individual recalls life experiences, recites anecdotes, and talks about what has been most meaningful. This has the advantage of preserving for future generations the image and voice of the ancestor. There are a number of companies that make a business of producing these life recordings.
We may suppose that only the famous have lived lives worth recording, but, in fact, there is something special about each life. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the American writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans were asked to produce an article about sharecroppers in the U.S. South. Focusing on three families, they created an enduring portrait of a nearly invisible segment of the American population, which was published in the classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. These families were anything but famous, and they had virtually no worldly goods, but each had their dignity, their dreams, and an interesting story to tell.
A living will, an autobiography or biography, or a video recording are all ways of describing a person’s intangible legacy. A tangible legacy is a gift of property by will or other conveyance at death. For example, you might leave a child a legacy of $1 million. An inclusive definition of “legacy” is anything handed down from the past, or from an ancestor or predecessor. It could be property with a dollar value, or it could be certain characteristics or conditions. In addition to money, you might leave your children a legacy of love and respect. It has been observed that what you leave in your children is more important than what you leave to them.
The fundamental question for all of us is what tangible and intangible legacies we will leave, and how we would like those legacies to be memorialized.