Legacy

60: (April 2023)

I played the piano for a funeral a few days ago. The service took place on what would have been the deceased woman’s 95th birthday; she had passed away about a month earlier. Although I didn’t know her at all in life, I learned a great deal about her in death.

She led what sounded like a fairly ordinary life, yet the way she lived rendered it extraordinary. As her children and grandchildren spoke about her during the service, it was clear that she had left behind a legacy of love, deep listening, and how to be a caring person in a troubled world.

The service moved me a great deal. I found myself pondering how a person can have a profound impact on the world simply by living with purposeful intention. After raising her four children and going through a divorce, this woman went back to school and became a licensed clinical mental health counselor, choosing to serve the most vulnerable patients. In addition, she took her role as a church and community member to heart and gave service to both throughout the years. But her greatest role may have been that of a doting grandmother and great-grandmother, always available with a ready ear and an open heart.

Despite having to move into an assisted care facility during her final year, she adapted to the gradual loss of much of her eyesight with grace. Case in point, she had asked a church member in her Unitarian Universalist church to print out the seven principles that form the core of that religion in extremely large font, and then placed them on her nightstand so that she could look at them every day. This was such an inspiration to me. Ninety-five years old, going blind, gravely failing health, and yet she worked out a way to keep the values she held most dear front and center in her life.

What are the treasures left behind? A life lived with intention. Flexibility and resilience in the face of difficulties. Making the people in your life feel cherished, seen, and heard.

An extraordinary legacy of a life well lived.

40: (April 2003)

I cannot remember a time when I have not been plagued by the line. I draw the line. I adjust it over time. It is always there. It is the line I draw between all the people in the world who are barely surviving and me. I am safe on one side, with all my stuff, and all my rationalizations, and the rest of the world that is hungry, or homeless, or generally living in poverty is on the other side.

I stay behind the line and tell myself it has to be there; it is the way the world functions. We all carefully draw and modify our own lines. Invisible, but ironclad, these lines separate us from each other. They keep the world churning, the pot stirred. We are all held suspended by these invisible threads.

Mother Teresa was one of the few people I know of who did away with her line. She threw it away one day and dissolved into the sea of humanity, unleashing a tremendous power into the world. The power contained within her willingness to love radically eased much suffering. I wish I had the kind of courage it takes to erase the line. But I do not. I hold on tight. A donation here, a volunteer activity there. It enables me to live with the fact that I will not part with the line.

My current rationalization for keeping it is my children. I tell myself I need to keep them safe, to give them things. So I bend the line into a box—a house—with all we need contained within it. And my children live, while thousands of other children around the world starve to death, or are otherwise in peril, every day. Aren’t they my children, too? If those children were before my eyes, would I not feed them, embrace them? But they are not immediately before me, and the line remains. I am removed enough that somehow, I am capable of continuing to live my life with full knowledge that others starve.

I know that to rid myself of the line would be to experience liberation. I know the disquiet of participating in the world’s inequities. The silent voice of my soul calls out. Yet the invisible line that I have struggled with all my life stubbornly remains. And it keeps me up at night.

60-40:

I suppose that living more than six decades has made me accept the fact that there will always be suffering in the world. It doesn’t mean that I have less compassion for those who suffer, but I think it’s made me feel less guilty for living a life of good fortune.

Perhaps all we can do is try to live a decent life, as the woman I wrote about did. We can strive to right wrongs and make the world a little better — I think we should try to do that, surely. But in the end, even Mother Teresa could not stop the tide of suffering, but she could do ordinary things to help people, one person at a time. As she is quoted as saying, “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.”

After all, it’s the love that can transform even the smallest act into something that ripples into eternity.