After

**In either a matter of months or a little longer than that, a scant few years maybe, I will be dead. This hasn’t stopped me from committing to 100 or so strength training sessions with a personal trainer, from voting, or working on another long and complex “artistic” project like the Moosical. I’m reading deep tomes about physics and life and aging and I get up every morning thinking about coffee. I also float into my evenings on a couple of glasses of wine.

I’ve been thinking about what I would like to leave as my ”legacy.” I have rejected the “good example of a caring, loving human being” scenario because I doubt I’ll ever get there. Good husband, father, grandfather – probably the same. I’m mostly lucky that my people like and accept me, but I’ll be no hero for great displays of philanthropy or munificence or great social change of any other sort. And I never did write that great hit song.

I do not exactly know how I would like to “live” on for a few more years in this world after death, via a “legacy.” This appeals, though I’m sure it WON’T happen: I’d like somebody who probably has not much of a life and/or a lot of time on their hands, to try to figure out what it was I was trying to do all those years, to dig through everything I’ve written or done and see if there are any redeeming qualities expressed there. And if there is, to tout them to the rest of the family at least, and wider if it seems appropriate. And if not, to just shut up.

Be honest, be articulate, but see if there’s a way to make this life of mine, which is still, at 75, such a great mystery to me, sensible.

And then go on to get a life and address the very scary problems I foresee for the coming generations. Become heroes of your own, make a difference where I never did. Don’t just slide into the mundane. Take risks that I never did, make changes that I never did – and think of me now and then as you do.