Legacy

I was just considering the idea of legacy and what it means to our culture today.  My granny is 95 years old and just one day ago my mom called and said that she was not doing well.  Doctors, always the prophets of doom were saying that she may not live past today.  Not the carriers of consolation we desperately hoped they could be, they can manage only their best: gather your family, perhaps some would like to say goodbye.  Goodbye?  Goodbye…

This blog is not about whether they are right or wrong or whether they have knowledge that transcends medical science because neither is worth wasting time on when I am convinced that when we hear news about loved ones, none of that stuff matters anyway.  We just want it not to be true.   Who has mastered saying goodbye?   Instead, I am simply thinking about what we leave behind at the end of our long or short lives.  We live and we die.  Hopefully, in between that time we will have done something worth remembering, something worth the tears our family and others will inevitably shed.

A popular periodical has invested worthy time I think in remembering those who left a legacy behind.  I picked it up one afternoon after gorging on the smut in a local Borders bookstore.  It never ceases to amaze me how I can spend hours indulging in things I could really care less about only to find a worthy source of inspiration in the final moments of my day.  If you’ve ever over indulged on crappy buffet food only to find that a simple meal of prime meat, potatoes, and veggies would have been truly treating your body and taste buds right, you’re my buddy and you’ll get the banality of waste in excess, but before I babble further, let me feed you the point.

I really don’t know what the point is.  LOL. I’m honestly still trying to figure it out.  A little Love Jones humor for you…

Truthfully, I started this blog before the start of summer although the humid May afternoons I spent in New York preparing for my grandmother’s funeral made me feel like it was really August.  I’m picking it up again and October has come.  We eulogized and buried my grandmother on May 2008.  It didn’t start out this way, but it certainly was a soggy and wet end.  The rain muddied the red clay of the burial ground and I remember the gesture of my friend Jason as he passed me his black umbrella.  With rolled up pants I stepped on the soddy dirt watching my family.  There were at least four generations represented there.  There were tears and pained smiles worn by many.  Of course, we were all going to miss her, but I wondered how it would impact our lives.  I wondered if we would ever understand what we were truly missing.  A person, my grandmother, my mother’s mother, my great aunt’s sister, my first cousin’s aunt, second cousin’s great aunt, and my nieces’s great grandmother.  She was all of those things and more, but I feel like a generation worth more than the sum of all the things we value has been lost.  I’m grieving.

My grandmother was a beautiful, thoughtful, meticulous, and careful planner.  She loved the music that marked the Harlem Renaissance and although she worked, she seemed to understand the importance of women being the caretakers of the home.  She grew up watching football and it wasn’t peculiar for “the game” to be on on Thanksgiving afternoon or any other, but she scoffed at women who kept their children out in the “night air.”   A man could be a rolling stone, but a woman was nearly unfit for life if she neglected her children.  That was unnatural.  I am missing her simple wisdom and stride in life.  I am missing her steady and faithful presence, the way she could always be found, at home.  How strange was it to see her walking up 116th street one day!  What was she doing almost 10 blocks away from her stomping grounds?  I’m laughing at my ignorance of her too!  She traveled a bit, but never boarded a plane.  “If God meant for humans to fly, He would have given them wings!” she would say.  She was incredulous about skyscrapers and high rise apartments, “I don’t like living in the sky.”  As long as I knew her she had lived on the 8th floor and I think my family knew that whether we needed her or not, for the most part we could find her there.  We could find a home cooked meal always and an apology if she had nothing to offer.  Who could take her apology seriously when they were scraping up left overs?  What was she talking about?  You had just stuffed your face with a meal that she had cooked a few days ago.

This was the woman who shook her head at my mom for not cooking, mumbled about there being “no bread in this house,” folks arriving late to holiday dinners and scolded my sister for cooking a small pot of rice!

Will the steadfastness with which she loved her grandchildren (especially the boys), the concern for protocol, attention to the issues of the day, practical ways in which she wore her role as mother and woman be lost on my generation?  On my nieces and nephews?  Had the generation before me gotten it?  Will we learn anything from her inconsistencies as a human being and will any follow her example to press into the kingdom of God?  Will they do it at an earlier stage of their life?

I suppose legacy is something I will continue to muse upon, but I am sure that my grandmother left a tremendous one.  I know she lived a long and full life and left countless examples that we would do well to emulate.  It is my hope that she knew Christ and that living I would honor her legacy in my life and dying I would be risen in glory to see her at the resurrection.