Legacy

With time on my hands, the bigger issues have begun to gnaw at me:  things like legacy, sacrifice, and achievement.  I do, though, remember why it was once important to worry about smaller matters - deadlines, expectations, productivity and all the other elements of job and career.  But aged wisdom tells me to set them aside fondly now - they belong to another season. 

When my grandson was very young, I spent scores of joyful hours with him, stalking imaginary deer in the back yard, warding off eagles, violently kicking white dandelion spores from their stems, talking in the language of a four year old.  With him, I was Benjamin Button, a young boy in a grandpa’s body, both of us immersed in the day. We warned the sun not to go down.

Most of our conversations were pure silliness with a couple exceptions - I seem to have been the first to introduce him to the concepts of God and immortality.  I gave God short shrift (“He made everything”) but I was serious about immortality.  I explained carefully to this little boy that as long as there was someone to remember me, I would never die. I think he was pleased by this and so he agreed with my plan:  after each visit when our time was up, we would share two or three things we were always going to remember about our day together.  Important things, like our practices in the lost art of good tackling techniques:  “head up, wrap up, deliver a blow.”

Of course, I’m sure none of our remembrances lasted more than 45 seconds in my grandson’s mind but I take great solace in knowing that he also won’t remember this game for what it was:  another feeble and selfish attempt at creating my legacy.  Along with all the digital images and resumes, I would use this boy as another floating bottle to preserve my message once I was set adrift. 

Lately though, I’ve come under the influence of Marcus Aurelius, Emperor and philosophic exemplum of Ancient Rome.  One of the great ironies in his writings (“Meditations”) is his dismissal of legacy and reputation as a useless waste of time:  “... suppose that those who remember you might be immortal, and so the memory will be immortal. What good is that to you? I shouldn’t even have to mention that all this is worth nothing to a dead man. But what good is it even to the living, except in some inconsequential way? For you forsake the opportunity afforded by your natural human gifts, in order to grasp onto the future gossip of others.”  And yet, two thousand years after his death, wise men and women still revere his guidance. 

I think that Marcus would be shocked that anyone in the 21st century would know his name (after all, his “Meditations” were not meant to be read by others).  But even after realizing that others had read his “diary,” I doubt that he would change his views. Two thousand years, ten thousand years ... ultimately we are all an indiscernible blip in time.  The Cosmos will eventually dissolve all traces of us.

Marcus may yet be proved wrong.  Unimaginable to the Ancients, the technology of forensics has produced a library of primordial creatures that stomped around millions of years ago.  Thus, if not our bones, can future discoveries give each of us the option to indefinitely preserve our existence?  To put each life on a Cosmic microchip so that for time immemorial, an intelligent life can peruse the flash of our existence at its leisure?  Certainly more effective and reliable than a four-year old’s mind. 

The vanity of that notion is absurd.  For whom, for what?  Of all the drops of water in all the oceans, someone, something, cares about mine?  Why, I ask myself, do you want anyone, let alone this little boy, to remember you to others?  He can’t pass on his experience with you to his children - only you two were in that moment.  For the unremarkable common man (most of us), the brief shout of our life echos only in the walls of the people we touch.  We should be careful then to ensure that brief encounter, that faint bark, holds meaning. 

Marcus would have us dismiss legacy and focus inward. In each of us burns a spark of divinity consisting of kindness and compassion, tolerance of others, and stoic acceptance of the time and circumstances we have been granted. All this is possible, he argues, if we simply succumb to the guidance of our own Intelligence and Reason. 

I embarrass myself by attempting to paraphrase Marcus Aurelius. I should only commend to you his journal of Meditations.*  A thoughtful person, a person with time on his hands like me, will be (and has been) enriched in so doing. 

So let us return to my little grandson.  Rather than attempting to fill his head with memories of G-Pa, I think he and I would be better served if I invented a game that surreptitiously exposed him to Marcus’ thoughts on the nature of a “good man.”  For instance, how simple to make a game out of this passage:  “For what more do you want, dear man, once you have done something good? Do you want some additional compensation? Does the eye demand wages for seeing or the feet for walking? Just as these were made for something and, in accomplishing their task, gain what is truly theirs, so too is man naturally a doer of good actions, and when he has done such an action, he has accomplished what he was made for and receives what is truly his.”  

On the occasion of what would have been my father’s 100th birthday, my brother and I reflected on what Dad had taught us about being good men. Between the two of us, we couldn’t think of anything.  Well then.  This needs to change.  Through this ancient beacon, I think I have been provided a template, a script.  Instead of clouding my grandson’s brain with banal flashbacks, I will become his teacher.  If he deems these seeds worthy and they take hold, pray that he becomes a teacher to his son as well.  In this way, I will have left a proper legacy. In this way, I will remind myself how to act in the short time left to me.  

* See for example, Jacob Needleman & John Piazza. “The Essential Marcus Aurelius.” Penguin Group, Inc., 2008. Apple Books.