How Childlessness and Impending Apocalypse Have Made Me Rethink the Concept of “Legacy”
Someday, I will be forgotten. Probably sooner than I’d hoped.
I’ve always been the record-keeper in my family. I researched my family tree with a driving passion. I needed to know the names of my great-grandmothers. I needed to know where they came from, what they did, who they married.
Not everyone has the privilege to do this. I took full advantage of that privilege and collected all those names and dates and plugged them into my family tree software. I printed out copies for all the relatives. I labeled and scanned all the old photographs. I even made lists of all the family names that I particularly liked so I could consider them passing them on to a child of my own.
But I didn’t have children.
I never would have guessed, all those years ago when I was dutifully and intricately recording all those branches of the family tree, that my branch would stop with me.
This is the end of the line.
When I am gone, I will be gone. There will be no great-granddaughter who will, someday in the future, be digging through the family tree records, hoping to find out more about her great-grandmother Yael.
I have two grandaunts who did not have children. Like me, that was not their choice. One of them, Aida, my paternal grandfather’s sister, died at the age of 21 after suffering from health problems her whole life. The other, Ruth, my maternal grandfather’s aunt (so actually my great-grandaunt), had a stillborn child, years into her marriage, and there were no living children to come after.
Even before I knew I would not have children, I felt a very strong connection to both of these women. Aida was the eldest child of four, just like me, the guardian of her family. And I was named after Ruth (one of my middle names), which made me feel very close to her.
I have always felt such a strong need to tell their stories. I understand that they will be forgotten if I do not.
I don’t even know where Aida’s grave is. I am the last living relative who even remembers her story. I tell it to my nieces and nephews, but will they remember? Will they care enough to pass this story along?
Will it actually matter if they don’t?
And Ruth…what will become of Ruth’s memory? I will leave her engraved pocket watch to my niece, Brynn, who was also given Ruth as a middle name (though after me, not after the original Ruth), but will Brynn tell Ruth’s story? Will she remember what she did with her life? Will she remember her daughter’s name, the one who was stillborn?
And…will it actually matter if she doesn’t?
What ancestors have escaped my notice three or four or five generations back? Which ones have already been forgotten? Isn’t that how it happens? That one day, one generation, the chain of remembrance is suddenly broken? And once it is, doesn’t it just lay there, waiting for someone to come back and retrieve it?
Time doesn’t work that way.
We move forward. We move on. We leave things behind.
Eventually, everything will be forgotten.
When I visited Paris in 2009, I needed to visit the three big cemeteries: Montmartre, Montparnasse, and Père Lachaise. As you can see, I have a deep need to remember the past — and make sure everything is recorded so that others can remember, too.
As I walked through the chilly graveyard after finding the ones I had wanted to see, my traveling companions and I passed a tomb that had turned into a crumbling pile of stone. One of them said: “What a waste, these monuments. Someday, people will forget who was in them and they’ll pass into ruin, like this one. Everything is so impermanent.”
It seemed such a surreal moment, looking at that stone monument that had been so carefully constructed by the people left behind. Its intricacies and grandeur suggested their need to preserve and protect the memory of the loved one who came to rest in that space.
And yet somehow, decades later, the chain had broken. Too many people had forgotten. The monument crumbled. The memory faded.
A legacy disappeared into nothingness.
There is a small, red hoodie hanging in my laundry room. My name is embroidered on it in white thread. It was my favorite jacket when I was 8.
Obviously, I cannot fit into it anymore. So why is it hanging in my laundry room?
I was saving it for my future daughter. I thought it would be so cute to give her something of her mom’s to wear.
I had a whole box full of items like that: my favorite clothes from childhood, the baby blankets my grandmother made me before she died, stuffed animals, books… All the things I had saved over the years that I wanted to pass on to my own child.
A few years ago, I took everything out of the box and sorted it all, giving some of it to a thrift store, some to my nieces, and deciding to bury — yes, bury — the few dolls that meant the most to me but were tattered beyond repair. I couldn’t bear to throw them in a garbage bin and imagine them in the local landfill.
One of the things I brought to my nieces was that red jacket. My sister immediately handed it back when she saw my name on it. “Their names aren’t Yael. Why would they want to wear something with your name on it?”
I’m somewhat embarrassed to say I had thought it might be cool for my nieces to wear something with their aunt’s name on it and know I had worn it at their age. I had thought my own daughter might feel the same, had I had one.
But it made sense that they wouldn’t. I probably wouldn’t have worn something that had my mother’s name on it, even something she had worn as a child.
I just couldn’t figure out what to do with it after that. Even being nearly 40 years old, it’s in very good condition and shouldn’t be added to our already overflowing landfills. I thought I could maybe remove the embroidered name and give it to the thrift store. But when I got out my seam ripper and faced the idea of cutting into those threads and pulling my name apart into oblivion…I couldn’t do it.
There was something about it that seemed too hard, too scary, too permanent, too painful. Like I was disappearing along with the legacy I had once been so certain I would leave.
I’ve gotten some news recently that has turned my world upside-down. One of the biggest things I’ve been trying to plant, propagate, caretake, protect, and preserve is disintegrating right before my eyes.
In some ways, you could call this my life’s work. The legacy of the past, one I was born into, that I clutched at with grasping fingers, protected with clumsy fists, and tried to grow into the future, just withered away in my hands.
It’s such a strange moment in time. Why did I spend my life focused on all that stuff? Why did I put so much effort into something that no one else seems to be that invested in?
I also must admit that looking forward in a world that seems doomed (pandemics, nuclear war, climate crises, political unrest…take your pick), my feelings about legacies, memory, and any illusion of permanence have been blown to hell. Even if I hadn’t gotten this difficult news, I’m not sure I’d feel that much differently. Who cares about my story, your story, their story, as we’re facing some of the scariest times in human history? Or the end of that history?
Who cares about the dolls that I buried, the books I gave to my nephew, or that red hoodie in my laundry room? Who cares about the family tree information I so carefully collected, the family video collection I edited and digitized, the photos I’ve sorted and scanned?
And who cares that this branch of the family tree ends with me? Who cares that I have no one to remember me when I’m gone?
Maybe all that was overrated in the first place.
It seems like every year, I finally get up the courage to let more stuff go. Seven years ago, I moved out of the house I had lived in with my ex and even though I had to severely downsize, I toted too much from our 3-bedroom house with me. He had been in such a hurry to start a life with his new girlfriend that he’d left everything behind.
And for a long time, I feared that getting rid of any of it would mean letting go of my dream to have a family of my own.
Everything remained carefully stacked and boxed in the garage of the duplex I ended up in after that. I decided I was going to buy a house and set it up just like before so New Partner could easily merge into my life and we could get to work having a baby, before it was too late.
But the house I bought ended up being only 600 square feet. For weeks, everything I owned remained in the garage because I realized only about ¼ of it would fit into the house.
The things I let go, I let go of out of necessity. I needed to be able to function in my house. To be able to walk from one end of the garage to the other. To fit my car in there, for heaven’s sake — wouldn’t that be nice?
But even after I made enough room for all that, I still couldn’t let go of so much. It’s taken me time to do that. Each year that goes by with romances that fizzle out five minutes after they flare, I realize more and more that this idea of leaving a legacy in the form of a child is very unlikely to happen. And each year that goes by and the world seems to seesaw mercilessly between oblivion and just the usual shit, I realize more and more that there might be no such thing as a legacy, anymore. Or at least, the idea of leaving one is less helpful in the big picture than we’ve been led to believe.
I’ve gotten rid of so much in the past few months. It feels both exhilarating and terrifying. I feel lighter. Freer.
And it feels more certain than ever that some of the things I most wanted in life are the things I will never have.
I try to remind myself that that’s okay, though. I’ll find other things I want, perhaps. Or maybe not. Either way, I will likely be more “alive” while just living, rather than chasing after the creation of a legacy.
Maybe the only real legacy is the legacy of the moment. After all, eventually the chain of memory will break and our human monuments will end up as nothing more than a pile of stones.
