Legacy – A June 8 Very Personal Reflection

Note: On this my 69^th birthday, I share this final (for now) thought on the meaning of my mortality.

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What will I leave when I’m done? When I’ve run this earthly course? When, in keeping with the reckoning of the Eternal Maker, my final transient thread I will have spun?

(These questions, an existentialist’s amusement. My self-indulgent, in part, melancholic entertainment as this day’s first light fills the firmament.)

Material wealth, I have not (though debt I do).

Yet there are shelves of treasured tomes (one, I’d written); all signposts of my intellectual excursions.

And numerous notebooks of numerous words. (To say “countless” would be hyperbole, but who’s counting?)

Many, o’er 40+ years, shaped into homilies; written and spoken at given times, with given peoples, in given places.

Other words posed to dance to the rhythm of poetic meter.

Still other words robed in the literary flesh of a cast of fictional characters; each bearing filaments of the tapestry of my personality.

What more will I leave? That, I believe, will (must) be the verdict of others.

Still, casting on myself (aye, my self) an eye of naked candor, this is what I think…

Not much, save others’ memories of the whispers of a ventriloquist’s voice practicing, perfecting the sound of respectability. And the public smile and laughter masking private fears. And the wizardry of a curtained-Oz occasionally able to conceal absent confidence. And the dry-boned valley of an oft wayward soul.

Indeed, not much. Maybe less.

Nevertheless, as long God grants me breath and strength, then, via the triune Spirit-power of faith, hope, and love, I have life to be and labor to do…

Thus, a chance to become someone I’d remember kindly and well.

© 2021 PRA