What Is Your Legacy? by Morton S. Gray
I’m a day late blogging this week, but there is a valid reason. My youngest son was 21 on Friday and we were invaded by his friends for the weekend. Seven staying on Friday night and five on Saturday has meant I’ve spent the rest of the weekend washing towels and bedding and restocking the fridge. It was however a great pleasure to chat to these young men and women, all about to finish their university days and embark on their careers – what a lovely group of young people and great friends to my son. I wish them all the best of luck with their final exams, dissertations and futures.
My own legacy has been a subject I’ve been pondering of late. There are of course my two sons, grandson and my seven published novels. I’ve probably mentioned before that my late mother wrote her memoirs for the period of her life from her birth in 1933 until the death of my father in 1989. Since mom’s death in 2022 I have been typing up her words – all 29,000 words of them, which for someone who consulted a dictionary for many spellings is no mean feat!
It was of course a very emotional journey through my mother’s life, including the war years and meeting and marrying my father and early information about myself and my younger sister, with many mentions of other family members too. I lost count of how many tears I shed, but I like to think it might have helped with the grief process too.
I now intend to embellish mom’s words with relevant photographs from her own extensive photograph collection and possibly add snippets from my own recollection of events mentioned. When I’ve done that, I need to investigate a short print run (any ideas welcomed) so that I can give copies of her memoirs to family members, particularly her grand and great grandchildren.
The process has been interesting and cathartic and has turned my thoughts to my own legacy of information and to getting this into some sort of order. The extensive notes I have on our family tree and the stories I wrote during a memoir course would probably all disappear if something happened to me tomorrow. So, I have vowed to produce a more lasting record in a format that family members might at least keep on a bookshelf.
I’ve started by photographing favourite things about the house and then writing the story of each object below, making sure of course that I print these pages and put them into a folder so that it is all together in one place.
So my purpose in writing this today is to urge readers of my blog to maybe consider their own legacy information and how that can be recorded. Any thoughts welcome in the comments …
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