About legacies

I mentioned in the previous post that I like to sit in the back yard and think. One of the themes I keep coming back to in that yard is the passage of time, and within that concept people, places and things. According to the Social Security Actuarial Life Table I have 8.88 years remaining. By my calculations that means approximately 91% of my life is behind me. It also means that many of the people, places and things I knew no longer exist. 

A few years ago I was having a conversation with Maribel's son. He commented that he had lost contact with many of his early childhood friends; found that to be surprising and a little sad, and asked if I had had that same experience. I answered with an analogy.

Imagine that you are a bus driver. In the early stage of your career your bus is always full and you become familiar with many of the regular passengers. In the middle years your buss is still full, but you become aware that quite a few of your regular passengers no longer ride your bus. In the later years, where I am now, you turn around and see that there is only a handful of passengers, and none of them are long-time riders. In my view everyone we knew, all the things we did, everything we felt and believed constitute who we are today. And everyone of those old faces that got off my bus took a part of my identity with them. What remains are memories. I see two types of memories; shared memories where the people, places and things that were part of a memory still exist, and personal memories, where I am all that is left. 

Sitting in the back yard I think back to my deer hunting companions and our north woods camp. Year after year we'd meet for a week of hunting, drinking and card playing. It was always a bit nostalgic when the week was over and we all packed up and headed our separate ways. They are all gone now. One is buried in a tiny off-the-road cemetery in Michigan's upper peninsula, another in a small Wisconsin town on the Mississippi River, two are buried in Milwaukee, and one was cremated; his ashes in an urn that will probably become a flower pot in one or two generations. None of them were notable and will quickly be forgotten. They were notable to me. I still remember them. I don't have a religious belief, but on a fall day toward sunset in my back yard I like to think that they're somewhere sitting around that cabin kitchen table drinking beer and playing poker, and saying to me, "Tom, your chair is here when you're ready."

I wonder...is it important to be remembered?  Is it important to leave some sort of legacy behind in the hope that you won't be forgotten? I guess maybe those are personal questions requiring personal answers. I wonder how Susan Hayward would answer them?  If you're under sixty or maybe even seventy you probably don't know who she is, or was. In the late forty's through the fifty's she was about as big as you could get in Hollywood. She starred in a ton of movies with most of Hollywood's leading men. She was a celebrity with a capital C. She had it all...fame, fortune and a very happy married life. Today her remains are buried in a tiny cemetery in a tiny Georgia town not forty minutes from my house. She is gone and forgotten; what I call dead-dead, as opposed to Marilyn  Monroe who is alive-dead. Marilyn died thirteen years before Susan but for whatever reasons we won't let her go. I guess that maybe sex-appeal is a powerful legacy.

Going back to the Social Security Actuarial Life Table and the 8.88 years I have remaining to me, my intention is to spend them in an alive-alive condition. Sure, I'm experiencing some of those 'gifts' that come with the 'golden years'. I wear hearing aids, have arthritis in all the usual places, have had cataract surgery in both eyes, had a knee replacement and am dealing with high blood pressure but I am in no way physically or mentally incapacitated and can truthfully say that I have enjoyed my life more in the past fifteen years than I ever did before. And as far as a legacy, who knows, maybe this blog will be mine.