Yes, you should want to be remembered

A legacy is a gift and a guide for future generations

Credit: Creative Commons

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A few years ago, I was talking to a family member about my then-recently deceased maternal grandpa. My grandpa had a colorful life — he was a bull rider and rodeo clown, among other things — and I’ve written before about how I worked with him as an adolescent.

During this conversation, I made a joke about how the truth is whatever we want it to be. I don’t remember the actual comment, but I do remember my family member’s response: His tone immediately changed, and he reminded me that “honesty was very important” to my grandpa. Whatever his faults, he evidently did not believe in stretching the truth.

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about the duty people have as they age to become leaders, mentors, and matriarchs and patriarchs in their families¹. In private conversations following that post, I also argued with people that we will be remembered — or, forgotten — based on what we do in older age. If you are absent in your grandchildren’s lives, they probably won’t remember you fondly.

But I’ve been a little surprised by the counterargument I keep hearing: “I don’t care about being remembered, and anyway worrying about your legacy is just an ego trip.” In other words, being remembered doesn’t matter².

I’m here to argue against this idea. Of course all of us will eventually be forgotten at some point, but as long as a person’s memory does persist, it continues to exert influence. And much as family members have a duty to one another in life, so too should they think about the influence — either positive or negative — that they leave behind in death. Ego probably does have something to do with the human urge to be remembered. But also, a legacy can be a gift to one’s descendants, a guide to a well-lived life.

I began this post with the anecdote about my grandpa because I think it illustrates this idea nicely. The lesson I took away from that conversation — and other similar conversations about my grandpa — was not just that my grandpa believed in being honest, but also that we are an honest family. Colorful chapters in his life notwithstanding, that is the characteristic that stood out to his kids, and which was passed down to me.

Interestingly, it is through that same grandpa that my family is related to an early Mormon pioneer and frontiersman named Jacob Hamblin³. Probably the most famous story about Hamblin has to do with an episode during which he sent his son to trade horses for blankets with the local Native Americans. The boy got the chief to keep giving him more and more blankets, then returned to his dad triumphant for having negotiated such a killer deal. But Hamblin chastised the boy and ordered him to return the blankets because the deal wasn’t fair. And then, back at the Native American settlement, the chief said he knew Hamblin would never tolerate such a lopsided deal — and he was thus expecting the boy’s return. Hamblin’s reputation for honesty was so impeccable that the chief had willingly accepted an unfair deal because he knew it would only be temporary. And I can only assume my grandpa’s worldview was influenced by this ancestor.

So here we have two people whose positive attributes have exerted a positive influence on subsequent generations. Is it good or bad that these people have been remembered? I would say it’s good, and that their memory helps hold me and their many other descendants to a higher standard.

There’s a broader lesson here about the instructional aspect of legacy. My elementary school teachers didn’t just teach me about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree (probably mostly a myth, but anyway), for example, because it was a cute story. They brought it up because the episode is didactic. Similarly, Washington is sometimes call the American Cincinnatus after a Roman general who walked away from power and embodied civic virtue. The memory of Washington and Cincinnatus is a guide to thinking about power and civic duty today.

I didn’t start this post talking about Washington or Jacob Hamblin, however, because I want to stress that this phenomenon is not limited to famous people. When my daughter was born, we named her after my paternal grandma. That’s in large part because we hoped my daughter would grow up to be like my grandma, who was a business woman, world traveler, and generally charming lady. I hope my daughter’s name is a reminder to her to have both drive and grit — but also to have a lot of fun along the way.

It’s hard for me to imagine people who, say, flee to cushy retirement communities — and I’m talking about both today’s seniors, as well as people like me who will be seniors someday — leaving behind similarly inspiring legacies. Imagine telling your kid, “We named you after grandpa, son, because he absolutely dominated the pickleball courts.”

Though it feels obvious to me, researchers have also confirmed that there’s value in legacy. A 2022 paper, for example suggested that doing family history can improve the psychological well-being of young adults. A 2008 paper argued that “knowledge of family history is significantly correlated with internal locus of control, higher self-esteem, better family functioning, greater family cohesiveness, lower levels of anxiety, and lower incidence of behavior problems.” Other researchers have linked family storytelling to stronger feelings of community and belonging, among other things. There is a variety of other research with similar findings.

But all of this only works if people actually remember each other. And fondly at that. So at least for me, I want to be conscientious about the legacy I might leave behind. In the same way that parents bequeath money or property to a child, they also bequeath a story. And while that may sound obvious, what’s sometimes overlooked is the essential role that story plays in village building. A collection of individuals becomes a community in part thanks to the memory of its founders and their values. Ergo, anyone who dreams of their children being a part of a vibrant community should think twice about being cavalier with their legacy.

I want to conclude here with a quote from John Ruskin, a Victorian era critic who wrote on numerous topics including architecture and the built environment. The quote comes from Ruskin’s essay “The Seven Lamps of Architecture,” and he’s talking here about actual structures. But the concept also applies to more abstract forms of building — for example, the building of a village.

When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, 'See! This our fathers did for us.

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1. Some people have noted in the wake of that post about elders that millennials etc. are part of the problem. I wrote about that previously here, but in short I think that’s true. I know plenty of people in my cohort who proactively hold their family at arms length over disagreements about things like politics or religion. And so I will reiterate that we can’t have it both ways and millennials need to knock it off with their desire to die on every hill.

2. I have a hard time actually believing people make this argument in good faith. If you look at so much of humanity’s creative production — paintings and sculptures, but also structures like the pyramids or the Taj Mahal — much of it adds up to a physical way to remember people who are gone. The urge to be remembered seems to be universal, and in that context I suspect the desire to not be remembered is actually the learned, unnatural behavior.

3. Hamblin was a polygamist and there are thousands of people descended from him in Utah and elsewhere, so this story is kind of like a locally famous folktale of the American West. I’m recalling it here from memory, having grown up hearing it, so if you are a scholar of the West and I’m botching some details, apologies.