My parents’ admonition to “Just wait until you have kids of your own” bore a great deal of truth. I am learning that with age, there are any number of things that I can give a heads up about to younger folks. Not only have I been blessed to see both of my children become parents in their own right, and I have had the tremendous good fortune to have several former teachers and assistant principals go on to lead their own schools and do extraordinary things with their professional lives.
We have now wrapped up my mother’s cancer treatments, and we have completed her move to Orlando, Florida. I am now settling into my new routine: more time with Anne and more time with kids and grandkids. One of the tasks I am taking on is to sit with my children to attempt to distill my experience of the last year or so to prepare them for the inevitability of their mother and I eventually falling victim to time.
This may well be an example of the essence of legacy-leaving. I am distilling the lessons I learned while caring for my mother and “managing her affairs” so that Hannah and Aaron, our kids, can begin to prepare their minds and their hearts for a task that, hopefully, still lies many years in the future.
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