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Who Will Be Left to Tell Your Story?
Let me share my existential crisis with you.
“Legacy, what is a legacy?
It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see”
— Lin-Manuel Miranda, “The World Was Wide Enough” from Hamilton: An American Musical
As I near my thirty-second birthday, I find myself thinking about the word legacy more and more. I think about the words I’ve written and where they might go after I’m gone. If anything is to be a “legacy” from my life, my creative writing is the only currency I have.
All those notebooks I collected and the few of them I filled up to the brim? I know where they’re going. Someone’s going to take them to a landfill — or, perhaps if they’re lucky, those tomes will find a new life by being recycled. Who knows? I’ll be gone, so why should I care?
But I do care. I worry about the after of my life. I try not to think of death’s aftermath — the great mystery that it is — but I know a world exists out there that will no longer know my name. It may take a few months or maybe a few years. My name will not live on. I’ll be captured in an obituary that some family members will read, and that will be that.
No husband. No children. Just books and maybe a few cats who will need to be re-homed for the remainder of their lives.
