A Life Recollected

Legacy is for rich people–or people who have made major contributions to this world, isn’t it?

Not so. Though I knew—because of my Sage-ing work–that everyone leaves a legacy (planned or not), I still harbored the belief that I personally had nothing worth passing on. So, I entered legacy work through the back door—via life review and memoir writing.

It started by my responding to the weekly questions I received from the gift of a Storyworth subscription. At the end of a year, the company sent me a beautiful book, my memoir. I immediately knew that before sharing it with my family, I wanted it to be more and better.  Over several months I re-organized the work, added to what I had written and self-published, calling this narrative A Life Recollected in Prose. My motivation included awareness of what I had learned about legacy:

• The stories I have lived, been told, remembered, and told myself—unless I tell them—will not outlive me.
• What’s in the past doesn’t stay in the past.
• Understanding from whom and where we come can help heal us (of what we may not even know needed healing), and what I have to tell may help others later.

Understanding that legacy writing is more than a review of life events, I wanted to communicate something of the legacy I have received as well as the values that have informed my life and will inhabit my legacy. My book begins with a prologue called My People, the Ancestors, in which I give the back stories of both of my parents (their ancestral histories) and stories of my mother and father together. I comment on and sometimes muse about ancestors’ connection to their historical time (e.g., slavery) and to the impact of my grandfather’s mental illness. Since my received legacy includes multiple historical works (some published) about various family members, I include inserts with lists of primary sources (memoirs, journals, letters) and secondary sources (books, newspaper and magazine articles).

In various chapters I tell stories of my relationship with each of my grandparents and other kin. I reflect on war and its ripple effects in my ancestors’ lives and my own, including reverberations of my father’s 2-year absence from my young life (in World War 2) and its impact on my relationships with both parents. I tell memories of my elementary school, high school and college years, including money awareness, jobs, cars, and driving, and my connection to the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. In a final, deeply reflective chapter, I talk about my life choices—marriage and divorce, parenting, faith, vocation, work, life-long learning, and roads not taken.

In a conclusion called Life at Eighty, I respond to a question from Storyworth: Are you the same person you were as an adolescent?  Other Storyworth questions prompted the following inserts:

• What I learned (and didn’t learn) from my parents
• Advice to my 20-year-old self
• My best advice about work

In the appendices I include an expanded resume (that could be useful in writing my obituary!) and some lists just for fun: A Few of My Favorite Things and Family Recipes.

The next year I self-published a follow-up volume—a collection of poetry I had written over a period of 50 years. It was rich—as I had “told it slant”—with glimpses into what I had struggled with and valued at various times and how I had grown.  Heavily annotating with names, places, and dates, I called the work A Life Recollected in Verse and Such.

The process of writing, collecting, and editing these two volumes was both hard work and immensely satisfying—harvesting the fruits of my years and making peace with my one and only life. I was reminded that not only does everyone leave a legacy (planned or not), but one’s legacy is not finished until she dies.  It can be honed and changed! I am grateful to have lived 83 years and to have the opportunity yet to hone and change my legacy.

For those interested in doing similar work, I recommend the following resources:

www.storyworth.com

kdp publishing (the self-publishing arm of Amazon)

Life-Legacies blog by Rachel Freed

Your Legacy Matters: a Multi-generational Guide for Writing Your Ethical Will by Rachel Freed