Lessons From my Parents 3/3

For many people, myself included, I am the living image of my parents. I am the combination of her deep respect and drive, his steadfast compassion, I am their collective legacy.

I understand that for many people who knew one or both of them, I represent not only the loss of my parents but the comfort that they are still here when they see his smile on mine, hear her laugh ring out through me, and feel the deep love and loyalty I have to give.

These are the moments, that for a split second, I see people look through me — it isn’t me they’re looking at anymore, it’s my mother, my father, the combination of them that I have come to represent in this world. On these days, I know that I lived “into” their legacy. Not lived up to but lived into what they have asked me to protect and hold in their absence. I have tapped into the greatest parts of them as part of my dedication to their remembrance, to bringing them back to the world, my world, if even for a single breath.

There are days when I see the very best of them in the mirror staring back at me which is both a comfort and impossibly heartbreaking. There are days that I can feel the things that haunted them, haunting me. Feeling the insecurities, the fear of the unknown and uncertainty that plagued them, which are parts of my complex inheritance as their daughter. It is a hard day to reckon that your parents have given you the things that both draw in and push people away.

They proved that legacy is in the power to accept those who arrive at your doorstep with their life in their hands, it’s showing up at the kitchen table in the dark hours of the night to give someone your tender love. It’s how you take the heart of those around you into your hands, holding it as if it is yours and gently caring for it.

They taught me that this legacy won’t be perfect because I’m far from it but it will be mine and by extension them. So, I hold in my hands and heart, our legacy, as it’s mine now entrusted to me from the two people who knew me the best, the two people who love me the most.

I had a choice shortly after my father passed away…this could make me or break me. It wasn’t a clear cut day when I woke up and said yes, this will make me but something that settled into my bones, knowing that I was now living for me and him. At the time my mother took stewardship of the legacy, of me as I begged her to help me back to a life that was gone the morning he died.

She took my heart and loved me through it instilling in me that my fathers love was too deep, too loyal to leave me. So, into this big scary world her and I marched forward, not always in lock step, but forward to end up together in their legacy.

Three lessons, two parents, one daughter … I walk in this world with her laughter in my chest, his smile on my face and the knowledge that I can love people through it because at the end of the day my parents have left to me a legacy that I am proud to carry.

Love Ray.