You’re Allowed to Gift Wrap Your Legacy
What do you think of when you hear the word legacy?
Perhaps you think of children, a career, a house, money, something you built, a business you started, charitable work, an award on a shelf or a name that people remember. Perhaps you imagine the sort of thing that gets written into an obituary, the achievements and milestones that supposedly add up to the mark we have left on the world.
But what if we've made legacy far more complicated than it needs to be? In the end, I think legacy is simply the pieces of ourselves we leave behind. Both physically and emotionally.
Think about the things you already have around you. The box of photographs tucked away in a cupboard. The recipe book in the kitchen drawer. The letters you've kept for decades. The jewellery you inherited. The books with notes in the margins. The ticket stubs, postcards, birthday cards and little objects that have somehow survived every house move. There are probably things in your home that wouldn't mean very much to anyone else, but which carry an entire story for you.
Now imagine someone finding those things after you die.
Will they know the stories behind the photographs? Will they know who the people are, why you kept that particular picture or what was happening in your life when it was taken? Will they know that the recipe book belonged to your mother, that the handwriting in the margins is hers, or that you made the same cake every birthday because she taught you how?
Will they know why that slightly battered object on the shelf mattered to you? Or will they simply see a pile of things they aren't quite sure what to do with?
I sometimes think we are lacking imagination when it comes to our own lives. We accumulate scraps without necessarily thinking about what those scraps might mean when we're no longer here to explain them. We assume that the people who love us will know the stories, remember the details and understand the significance of the things we leave behind.
Maybe they will. But maybe they won't. When we talk about legacy, we often seem to focus on the grand things. Did you have children? Did you have a successful career? Did you build something? How much money did you leave behind? How much charitable work did you do? Did you make a significant contribution to the world? These things can matter, of course, but I think we've become too accustomed to measuring a life by its achievements. We seem to have inherited the idea that a worthwhile life must produce something impressive enough to leave behind.
I'm not convinced that's true.
We're all just humans trying to make our way through this strange and extraordinary experience of being alive. None of us asked to be here. We don't know how long we're going to get, and none of us gets to do it perfectly. Eventually, we all leave. Our careers end, our possessions pass into other hands, the buildings we built are altered or demolished, and even the things we thought would last forever can disappear. None of this means they didn't matter. But perhaps the most important parts of a life aren't necessarily the things that survive us in a physical sense. Perhaps they're the things that survive in other people.
The way you made someone feel welcome. The fact that you always remembered someone's birthday. The way you forgave easily. Your habit of making tea for anyone who came through the door. The way you noticed the first snowdrops of spring or stopped to watch the sunset. Your terrible jokes. Your ability to make people laugh when they needed it. The meals you cooked. The stories you told. The way you knew your neighbours' names. The fact that people knew they could turn up at your house and there would always be something to eat.
These might not be the things we traditionally think of as a legacy, but perhaps they tell us much more about a person than the size of their bank balance or the job they had ever could. So perhaps instead of asking yourself, "Have I done enough to leave a legacy?" there is another question worth asking.
What do I want to be remembered for?
That question might feel uncomfortable. It might even bring up some of the judgement we carry about ourselves. We can spend an enormous amount of our lives trapped in the idea of good versus bad, measuring ourselves against some imagined standard of what a good person should be. We judge ourselves, we judge other people and sometimes we spend so much time worrying about whether we've been good enough that we forget to actually live.
Perhaps we can let some of that go. You don't have to decide whether you've been a good person before you're allowed to think about your legacy. You don't have to have achieved something extraordinary. You don't have to have children, own a house, build a business or change the world. You can simply ask yourself what you want the people who knew you to remember about you.
Perhaps you want to be remembered as someone who was curious. Someone who appreciated simple pleasures. Someone who loved fiercely. Someone who was generous with their time. Someone who could always be relied upon to make room at the table. Someone who was willing to apologise. Someone who knew how to forgive. Someone who made ordinary days feel special.
And once you start thinking about legacy in those terms, something interesting happens. It becomes much less about what you leave behind and much more about how you live now.
We can't control how our children turn out, and nor should we. They are their own people. We can't control the trajectory of our careers, whether our businesses succeed or whether the things we build will survive us. We can't control whether someone keeps our favourite chair or takes our treasured collection to the charity shop.
But we can make choices about who we are while we're here.
We can pay attention to the people around us. We can learn our neighbours' names. We can tell people that we love them. We can take photographs. We can write down the story behind them. We can record our family recipes. We can explain why an apparently insignificant object matters. We can write letters. We can make things. We can collect the fragments of our lives and give them some context.
We can curate. I love thinking about legacy in this way because it means we don't have to leave it entirely to chance. We can take the scraps and begin to weave them together.
A photograph on its own is just a photograph. A recipe is just a recipe. An old necklace is just an old necklace. But when you add the story, the memory, the context and the meaning, they become something else. Together, they begin to tell the story of a person. They become the fabric of a life. And I think we have the ability to curate that fabric while we're still here.
That doesn't mean manufacturing some polished version of ourselves for posterity. It isn't about creating a flattering autobiography or trying to make sure everyone remembers us as wonderful. It is about authenticity. It is about choosing the pieces that matter and giving the people we love a way to understand them.
You might have a box of photographs that has been sitting untouched for twenty years. You might have recipes written in a relative's handwriting. You might have objects whose significance exists entirely inside your own head. You might have stories that you have told a hundred times but never written down. You might have memories of people who have already died that you don't want to disappear with you.
These are your materials. You can do something with them. You can make a book. You can write things down. You can annotate your photographs. You can create something beautiful. You can leave explanations alongside the things that matter. You can make it easier for the people who come after you to understand not only what you left behind, but who you were while you were here.
In a way, this is what personal legacy curation means to me. It is the act of paying attention to the fragments of our lives and recognising that, when woven together, they can become something meaningful. And perhaps that's why I like the idea that you're allowed to gift wrap your legacy. You don't have to wait until you're old. You don't have to be ill. You don't need to know when you're going to die. You don't need to have everything figured out. You can start now.
You can begin collecting the stories while you still remember them. You can preserve the photographs while you still know who is in them. You can write down the recipe while you still remember who taught you. You can record the memories that shaped you. You can create something that says, in whatever way feels right to you, this was me.
One day, the people we leave behind may have questions we won't be here to answer. We can't prevent that entirely. But perhaps we can leave them a few more answers than they would otherwise have had. Perhaps we can leave them more than a pile of possessions to sort through. Perhaps we can leave them a story.
This is the thinking behind Memento Makers, a series of creative workshops I'm running as part of Good Grief Weston. On Sunday 4 October, you’ll have the chance to Make Your Own Legacy Book at Weston Artspace, where we'll explore personal legacy curation and begin recording some of the memories and stories that have shaped us into who we have become.
You'll begin creating a beautiful, handmade heirloom that can grow with you over time. There is no prescribed version of what your legacy should look like. It might contain photographs, memories, recipes, letters, drawings, fragments, stories or things that would be impossible for anyone else to understand without you explaining why they matter.
It isn't about creating a perfect record of your life. It is about capturing something of your essence while you still have breath. Because perhaps legacy isn't really about what we achieve, what we own or what we leave behind. Perhaps it is about the pieces of ourselves that continue to exist in the world after we have gone. The stories we told. The love we gave. The things we noticed. The people we welcomed. The memories we made. The small traces of a life that, taken together, say something about who we were.
In the end, legacy is simply the pieces of ourselves we leave behind. And you're allowed to gift wrap them.
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