What Legacy Will You Leave?

The other day, I asked ChatGPT to tell me the three most important things to do in preparing to die. The answers were typically boring – write your will, sort out your financial affairs, assign powers of attorney. Which got me thinking about legacy and what really matters, and I discovered it is quite simple really. Here’s what I’ve learned:

My grandmother on my mother’s side used to say, “Before I die, I want to see the pyramids.” I don’t really know how serious she was, but she never got to Egypt, and now I cannot look at the stark geometry of pyramids, turning red against the rays of a setting sun, without thinking of my grandmother.

She was small, dark-haired woman of strict rules. She could frighten us as children. Her radiant blue eyes flashed in anger if we sulked and refused to eat our vegetables. Other times, she would call me and my brother from the garden and hold out a red tomato she had grown and say, “Eat this. It is as sweet as sugar.” I didn’t like raw tomatoes, but if my grandmother admonished me to eat, I would eat if only to give her pleasure and see her blue eyes shine from the simple act of sharing.

I never met my grandfather on my father’s side. By most accounts he was dashing, a man who dared to defy convention, and he was reckless. He liked fast cars. Driving his family on vacation, he swerved around a corner on a country lane, skidded off the road and the car flipped. All four children and his pregnant wife escaped, but he was trapped inside. My uncle climbed beneath the car, his father grabbed his hand and said to him, “Go, and take care of your mother for me.”

The car burst into flames and he died. My uncle and my father worked paper rounds as children to help support her, and throughout their lives, no matter what or where they were, they always cared for their mother.

My father died at 82 of a massive heart attack, and my mother lived on for eight more years. A woman of quick intelligence, she had chosen a demanding husband and four children over a career in nursing. Now in her late 70s, for the first time she was alone. My younger brother, my sister and her granddaughter and I lived nearby, so most weekends one of us would arrange to visit. Over time, a series of strokes left her less able to walk and her brilliant blue eyes began to fail.

In those last days, she would sit in her sunroom furnished in damask pink where the patio doors opened onto the garden she had tended for so many years, listening to books on tape. One weekend, we were drinking tea there when she said to me, “The vicar came to visit and invited me to attend church. Nice young man, but I told him I don’t see any evidence there’s an afterlife. He didn’t know what to say to that.” She laughed and said, “What do you think happens when we die?” I didn’t know what to answer, and I still don’t know. A few weeks later, the daffodils had not yet bloomed when my mother said, “Nobody needs me anymore.” She died the following week. I placed yellow daffodils from her garden on her breast. My mother’s name was Grace.

She died thinking she was of no more use, which makes me cry, because what she left behind was far greater. Like my grandmother, my grandfather and my father before her, she left behind a legacy more powerful and stronger than any of the pyramids: She left a legacy of enduring love.