By Jan Vicente B. Pekas
To this day, we are able to remember all the saints and the rest of the dead, their actions recognized or unrecognized, because of their lasting legacy. It is after all, the thing that stays on even as our physical bodies deteriorate and joins the earth to be one and our soul pass on to another realm. The legacy of a person, good or bad, is what dictates the narrative surrounding a person, what they whisper about after the fact and what people will shout proudly to others. It may be what men obsess about, unable to come to terms with the fact that their names will be forgotten as time passes or it may even be just an afterthought for some, not minding a thing that they won’t even be able to witness through their eyes. Regardless, there is no séance or ritual for the dead to speak through, their actions while they had lived will do the speaking for them.
It has been more than a year now after our grandmother passed in 2024. Each of the family remembers her in one way or another. A caring mother, a disciplinarian, or a sweet old lady. That is all thanks to her past actions, her legacy that lives on through her descendants. In the end she was able to raise a flock of children and held up the house with all its burden that come along with it.
She didn’t seem like someone who cared too much about the whole legacy thing. But as far as I can tell, she left a better legacy than the many people who obsessed about the matter, with all their money and power they left something worse than a turd.
What is legacy truly if you are alone in your deathbed with no one to be with you as you pass on. At the end of this all, will we have someone to be with us at the end, or just left all alone.
Our grandmother was not alone in her final moments. Even as we went back to her hometown, the scene was not a small private ceremony, but an entire community who had their own stories with her gathering in her honor. The amount of people who showed up, who shed tears along with her children, was the true showing of legacy. Legacy can only live on through people and it was very clear, many people cared about her, and her memory is not going away anytime soon.
As part of the living still, and someone who wonders what people may think of themselves after they pass, perhaps that is not the true path to attaining a lasting memory, into making sure all you have done was not for naught. As part of the living there is only the task of living, let other people make a memoir of your story. **
