As night threatened to fall on our last day at the beach, The Mc and I sat on our rented patio with drinks in hand watching the beach goers making their ways home with rosy skin and sand in places no one wants to think about. We made small talk about the books we’d read or were reading during the last few days and I summarized a few chapters from The Last Lecture that resonated with me, ones I thought would hit home with him as well.
Suddenly and unintentionally the conversation became more serious.
The thing that left an imprint on my feeble little sand coma mind was not just the adoration and honesty with which Randy Pausch wrote about and for his children, but the insightfulness demonstrated as he prepared them for a world without their dad. His desire to leave them with his wisdom - a lifetime of lessons and learnings and mistakes and morals and values and a smidge of his zest. Words, emotions and travails he wouldn’t have the opportunity to convey first hand.
The Mc lost his dad when he was 12 and I (as you probably know) when I was 23. I thought about what we, as a couple that won’t become parents, will pass along - and to whom.
What is my legacy, what is our legacy? Who do we pass life lessons of our own on to, let alone the lessons our parents provided us? Will that wisdom die with a generation? Does it matter? Is it like someone telling a toddler not to touch the stove, knowing full well they have to experience the heat for themselves to realize the lesson behind the words? Or is it possible there’s a nugget in there that needs to be churned up and washed off to show someone twenty years from now “See? It only looked like a turd. Would you have known that ruby was in all that muck?” Who do we leave the proverbial turd for, and what does it look like? My blog? A novel we have yet to write? Weekends with extended family and ramblings to teen children that don’t belong to us?
Anyone who has reached their thirties knows that part of growing up means going through waves of gaining and loosing friends as your values, priorities, and interests change. In as much as the bubble written with hearts over the letter “i” in the epitaphs scrawled in yearbooks are genuine and real at the time, and that the promises and professions of “BFF” and pacts to keep in touch and grow old together dissolve with the years. So, too, do adult friendships.
In my twenties there were at least two waves of friends who came and went once they married or became parents. It’s not a fault I find with people, it’s a rite of passage. I accept, I move on, because parenting isn’t for me, I chose another path. Now that The Mc and I are in our mid and late thirties respectively, we ponder our future. Not what’s for dinner or where we’ll be in five years or even what the cabin is going to look like…but the real future. The end future.
We moved from the porch to the couch and continued to talk about how different our future looks when compared to those of [most of] our friends.
When all our hair is the color I just suffocated and we’re trying to deny the possibility of Depends being on the grocery list, they will be welcoming home college students, or grads, or adult children or even grandchildren. We will welcome visitors to our home. Siblings, nieces, nephews, friends and their children; but none of our own.
We wondered aloud if we’d made the right choice for the right reasons - knowing full well that we had - but questioning is always good and healthy. We were bouncing about the possibility of an alternate reality for the sake of our own potential future loneliness.
There were no answers that night, and there aren’t any tonight. Ours is a future we’re choosing because it fits us, and it’s just as scary to face a future where you’re bearing the responsibility of shaping another human being as if you’re facing a future without.
Still, there are more questions at the end of the conversation then there were when we started. Will we be old and alone/lonely, or alone and surrounded with friends? Will they be friends we haven’t met yet, or will the relationships we have today survive children (and my opinions of how little people should be reared)? What will happen if he goes first, or if I do? Will there be a strong enough support network to carry us through? There will be no offspring arguing about who will or won’t house us, how to pay for our medical care, or what to do with our remains…how soon can we get that paperwork in place? Who will provide the horrifying antidotes for our eulogy if there are no children waiting for an opportunity to embarrass us?
Like I said, I don’t have the answers…hell, I’m not even sure I knew I had the questions.
I write, you read. It's a clean and simple relationship.