This photo was taken nearly 20 years ago; but this past week has been bittersweet, especially for my husband. His 88-year-old Mom completed her journey on this earth and began a new life in her heavenly home. There is still a lot to process and future decisions to be made; but we have continued to return to one thought in the last few days. As my mother-in-law was the last of her generation in the extended family where my husband spent his childhood and youth, he has come to realize that he is now part of the oldest generation for this family. I also experienced this when my own mother passed over four years ago: the end of one generation and the promotion of the next one to a new position.
This realization can bring mixed feelings. Who you were is no longer who you are. Even though we have been adults for a very long time, it feels different when the last member of your parents’ generation passes on. Without any official assignment of duties, we and our siblings suddenly become the sole keepers of the family’s legacy. And as children sort through the things that are left behind by their parents, they instantly become responsible for what to keep and what parts of the family will carry forward to future generations.
I couldn’t help but think about some of the family stories from the book of Genesis. Although Abraham’s sons Isaac and Ishmael lived completely separate lives and didn’t get along, they came together in Genesis 25:9 to bury their father when he died. The same was true for Isaac’s sons, Jacob and Esau, who also didn’t allow their deep differences to keep them from coming together in Genesis 35:29 to bury their father when he died. And, in Genesis 50:13 we see Joseph and his brothers (the ones who hated him so much they sold him) coming together and making the long journey back to Canaan from Egypt to properly bury their father Jacob in the same cave as Abraham and Isaac. While all of these stories reflect Old Testament customs and protocol, they also show us that each of these people valued upholding their parent’s wishes and understood the importance of the family’s legacy.
Our 21st-century Western culture doesn’t always approach things the same way as this. Legacy is now sometimes defined by the money left behind, the possessions inherited, or the stipulations of the deceased person’s last will and testament. But the legacy we leave is much more important than these types of things. It involves the kind of character we have and what we seek to instill into our children and our grandchildren. Our spiritual legacy is so much more important than the material things our heirs will someday have to sort through.
Building our legacy starts when we begin our adult lives and leave our parents’ home to start our own families. But there’s something unique about the timeframe of our lives when we become the oldest generation in our birth families. When parents pass on, we begin to be faced more directly with our own mortality and to think about the legacy we will leave behind. I am reminded of the lyrics to a song that Dan Fogelberg wrote about his own family many years ago:
And the sons become the fathers
And their daughters will be wives
As the torch is passed from hand to hand
And we struggle through our lives
Though the generations wander, the lineage survives
And all of us, from dust to dust
We all become forefathers by and by.
We are all heirs, and we will all become forefathers/ancestors. And each of us gets to decide what our legacy will be. It is never too late to make sure that it is something truly worth remembering.
