Chan
Last Saturday, I attended a memorial service for someone I worked with for a decade. He was a very intelligent and very focused man who brought passion to anything he attempted. He raised a marvelous family, he gave his time and talent to his community, and he worked diligently to help create positive actions.
After suffering several strokes, he passed away peacefully a few weeks ago. The memorial service was very well done. It was a celebration with laughter and tears, joy and sadness, as we reflected on the many ways this person touched our lives.
The man was a forester. Not by education, but by owning and loving his own private forest, nurturing it on the ground, joining with other forest landowners, and seeking political change to protect his land and his ability to manage it. That forest has been in his family since 1860, and is a legacy for his family.
I drove home by traveling up Highway 101, what I call the coastal route. The memorial service was in Longview, and I motorcycled westward on Highway 4, then turned north toward South Bend and Montesano. The coastal route passes through many different kinds of forest: young deciduous trees, old alders, thin Douglas Fir, cedar, hemlock, mature firs. As I rode, I thought about his life, and how he loved some things so deeply, and what that meant to those lives he had touched.
What do we leave behind when we pass? What is our gift to the people still living?
Material goods, assets, debts: these things immediately come to mind. Then there is a second layer, and that is the relationships that have to be severed or untangled or nurtured…relationships with banks, creditors, investment advisors, organizations, government agencies, friends, old classmates.
My pondering is really about the third layer that’s left once we strip away the material things and the temporal things. What is left? What is our legacy? Is it the character of the people we leave behind? Is it the obvious and subtle changes in our community we helped create? Is it simply the positive example of a life well lived, fully, with love and purpose?
I don’t know.
I do know I am richer for having known and worked with this individual. That I am pondering how his living and dying have affected me means he has affected my life. It means I have an opportunity to learn from his goodness, and incorporate that knowledge into my relationships and choices.
That opportunity is now, not after it is my time to pass. To build something, to have something tangible or intangible to leave behind as a legacy, means I have to make positive choices and take positive actions now. Tomorrow, and tomorrow’s tomorrow, may be too late.
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