Legacy

My cousin had a baby, her first child.  We're very excited for the new parents and wish we lived closer and could meet the little guy in person.  Instead, I have to settle for looking at pictures from the new family and making a baby blanket to send to them.

The blanket was a no-brainer, really, because our grandmother was an avid crocheter and had she still been alive, there is no question but that she would have made blankets and layettes and other assorted crocheted gifts for her 4th grandchild, the 3rd born after her passing.

As it is, I'm the only one who had nearness and interest enough to learn to crochet from her and I was given her collection of crochet hooks when she passed away.  The blanket, of course, is being made with one of her hooks.  As it should be.

Crochet was part of her legacy to me and the blanket, I hope, will be part of my legacy to my cousin and her family.

With cancer comes a tighter focus on what will happen when I die.  I hope it won't come for a good long time, but I know that it may well be sooner than I would have previously thought.

Legacy is a complicated thing.  My grandmother was a complicated person (aren't we all) and she wasn't universally loved.  Most of her family was more willing, I think, to cherish the good and deal with the bad.  That was definitely true for me.

There are 3 things I remember most strongly about my grandmother: her crocheting, her pie making, and the way she would regularly hold my arm and tell me, "You were always a good baby," well into my adulthood.  The first two, I suspect, she understood would be part of her legacy.   The last one, probably not.

But the baby stories I'm usually told are not the "good baby" kind.  My mother (her daughter in law) talks about how I cried incessantly for the first 3 months of my life and she felt so helpless and miserable, how I was jaundiced and the doctor told her, "that baby is a carrot!" and she had to stop nursing me earlier than she wanted, how when I finally smiled she was so surprised because she really wasn't sure I would ever smile at all.  It wasn't until I had my own daughter that I began to wonder about how the helpless, little newborn me ended up being cast as the villain in her own baby stories.

Maybe my grandmother knew these were the kinds of stories I had and wanted to be comforting.  Perhaps it's just that she lived far enough away not to understand how rough I (unintentionally!) made it for everyone.  Or maybe she just was more willing to cherish the good and deal with the bad and thought I was a really good baby.  Maybe it was just one of those things like a nickname or a catchphrase that just became a habit.  However it was, that small detail, that tiny but regular comment lives on to me as part of her legacy.

I wonder what will live on about me when I'm gone.  I hope it will be some nice things, like my cooking and the costumes and clothes I made for my daughter and all her dolls.  I understand it will probably be negative things, too, like how I never finished that cross-stitch Christmas stocking or how I hated to talk on the phone and would go to great lengths to avoid it.  And, most likely, it will also be those little things, those "always a good baby" moments that I never even considered thinking of as legacy.

I guess now that cancer treatment has bought me some time, I am more conscious of what may be remembered about me.  It crossed my mind when I made my adorable nephew a Halloween costume this year, will I end up being, "you remember Aunt Kate, the one who made you that costume"?  It crosses my mind as I make the blanket for the new baby, as I make another batch of the chocolate-chip muffins my husband and daughter like, as my daughter and I geek out over the upcoming Hobbit movie.  It's not, thankfully, the focus of what I do, and it's not the reason I do things, but it's often there in the back of my mind.

My father always "slips" a little bit of cash to my daughter when he sees her.  It's something his grandparents used to do for him and he likes to pass that on.  I never met the grandparents of his who did that, so their legacy to me is small and only tied to the things my father and grandfather told me.  In another couple of generations, their memory will be gone, I guess, but maybe my daughter's daughter will still be slipping a little cash to the grandkids.  For that matter, maybe it's been going on for a hundred generations by now.

John Green's excellent (fiction) book The Fault in Our Stars focuses on legacy.  It's about some teens with cancer, one of them wishes to make a grand gesture so that his life has meaning while the other tries to live carefully with as little impact as possible to minimize the pain when she's gone.  I guess I am more of the grand gesture type, perhaps with less emphasis on the "grand"--I'd be happy to be remembered for everyday kindnesses, but I would like to be remembered.

Although, of course, I hope I won't have to be remembered for a good long time.  At least not until I have the chance to make blankets for the grandchildren and tell them all that they were always very good babies.