Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

What Will I Leave?

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
August 17, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

In Randy Pausch’s book, The Last Lecture, with Jeffrey Zaslow, he speaks of important and loving counsel he received from his minister while he was in his final illness, but he doesn’t identify the religious tradition. He says that he deliberately left it out, thinking to make his message more universal, more easily heard by people of any faith, or none. However, I know what his religion was, because the first I learned of his lecture, his book, and his life was when his death was announced, and mourned, on the Unitarian Universalist Association website last month. He and his family were active members of the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, and his “last lecture” was packed full of the kind of teachings that one might hear from a UU pulpit any Sunday.

In its obituary, the New York Times said “he gave practical advice in his lecture, avoiding spiritual and religious matters.” The San Francisco Chronicle made a similar comment. Maybe they just don’t know that in our tradition, pieces of advice such as “show gratitude,” “tell the truth all the time,” “a bad apology is worse than no apology,” and “be a communitarian” are about spiritual and religious matters. These are Randy Pausch’s answers to the question that was the whole point of his giving the lecture: what kind of legacy would he leave?

I suppose the papers were led astray by the fact that Randy didn’t speculate aloud about whether any other life awaited him on the other side of death. As far as a reading of his book reveals, he had no such faith, and perhaps no such concern. His eyes were turned towards the future of this world, the world cancer would soon force him to leave. “When I cry in the shower,” he wrote, “I’m not usually thinking, “I won’t get to see [my children] do this” or “I won’t get to see them do that. I’m focused more on what they’re going to lose than on what I’m going to lose …That’s what chews me up inside, when I let it” (191-92). He was thinking about this world and the people in it. While Unitarian Universalism, being a creedless faith, does not dictate what any of us believes about whether there’s a next life, it focuses our attention firmly upon this one. Our aim is not to get into heaven (and not just because, as a cartoon that’s recently been posted on one of our church bulletin boards proclaims, we’re a little glum about the whole prospect of getting wings and a halo and standing among the clouds — or maybe we just wouldn’t like that piece of mythology to be proved correct). Our aim is to conduct our lives in such a way that the world is better for our having lived.

Randy explains in his introduction, “A lot of professors give talks titled ÔThe Last Lecture.’ Maybe you’ve seen one. It has become a common exercise on college campuses. Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can’t help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?”

That’s the question I want to put before you today. It is one of the core questions of any examined life: What do you want to leave as your legacy, and what do you need to do to make it so?

Randy Pausch died young: he was 47 years old. His oldest child was only seven; he had been married only eight years; he had less time to shape the world than we have grown accustomed to expect and hope for ourselves. A life forty or more years longer than he was granted: that’s what we consider a proper life span. But you know, if we take a step back and see our lives from the perspective of the redwood trees around us that live many hundreds of years, even 90 years seem not all that many. Take a few more steps back and see us in the context of these hills and valleys, and even the longest human life, or the life of any living thing on earth, seems very short. Certainly many elders look back at the age of 85, 90, 95 years and say, “Where do the years go? Wasn’t I a child just yesterday?” As one of our hymns sings, “a human life when truly seen is briefer than a kiss.” ¹ Randy Pausch’s co-author reminded us, “His fate is ours, sped up.”

Small wonder that we long to do something that will outlive us. If our effect on this world is to be more than a dimple made in water, we wish to leave something of ourselves behind, something we value, something that will shape the world for the better after we are gone, even after our names and our deeds are forgotten.

In the past couple of years, we have had workshops here on writing your “ethical will,” the spiritual counterpart to your last will and testament, leaving behind wisdom and blessings instead of real estate and money. Ethical wills date back at least to Old Testament times, when people gave blessings, burial instructions, and advice for life. “Today’s ethical wills may include important personal values and beliefs, important spiritual values, hopes and blessings for future generations, life's lessons, expressions of love, forgiving others and asking for forgiveness,” the Ethical Wills website explains. ² It calls the writing of an ethical will a way to “preserve your legacy of values.”

Someone witty once responded to the truism “We live and learn” with “And then we die and forget it all.” Ethical wills are one way to ensure that our learning and our love will not vanish with us. Randy’s Last Lecture is an example of a particularly long and elaborate ethical will. The songwriter Si Kahn put the same longing into a song with this refrain:

(singing)
What will I leave, what will I leave, what will I leave behind?
When I am gone, who’ll carry on? What will I leave behind? ³

It is one of the central questions of our lives. Will you ask it with me? Will you sing it with me?

What will you leave behind? What are you building now that will shape a better world for others to live in, as some foresightful and loving people before you shaped yours? And who will carry on? — how will what you have learned in this life survive to guide another generation?

I’m sure you’ve been advised many times to make a will to make sure that your material legacy gets passed on the way you want it to. If you haven’t acted on it yet, here it is again: Make a will. Now that that advice is dispensed: what is your ethical will? What are you doing to make sure the legacy of who you are and what you value is passed on? Take a moment right now to envision your ideal world of the future. What values thrive there? What are you doing to make them live today?

Randy’s last lecture has plenty of wise advice in it, delivered with humor and humility: Be a recovering jerk (which is how he describes himself). It’s better to be earnest than hip. Try to treat the brick walls you hit in life as a chance to show how badly you want what’s on the other side. Take risks; he used to give out a “First Penguin Award” in his classes — someone has to be the first penguin into the water that might contain a predator, so be that first penguin. Don’t obsess over what other people think. He was a good man, and we could all take some of his life’s learnings to heart, so I’m glad he recorded them for all of us to see, not just privately for his children.

That said, and as sound as his principles are, the lesson I take from his book is not so much to live by his principles, but to live by our own. Not to be guided by his wisdom but by our own lights, and then to pass them along.

How do we do that?

Well, if you want to pass your genetic legacy on to another generation, the thing to do is have children. All done. Whether you raise them or not, whether you’re a good parent or not, whether you’re happy with the people they grow up to be or not, you have ensured that your DNA will be around after you’re gone — at least, the closest approximation of your DNA you can get without cloning yourself.

If you want to pass on your material legacy, the thing to do is make a will. Put it in clear language, have it witnessed, sign it, and put it where your heirs can find it, and you’re set.

A spiritual legacy has to be passed on in other ways. Your spiritual legacy consists of your values, your beliefs, your principles, all the things you’ve learned that you hope others will learn a little more easily because of your experiences. How you convey them depends on your particular talents. As Randy Pausch said, he put them in a lecture because he was a lecturer. You could draw them, write them, dance them, deliver them via videotape, as you choose. But really, the issue is not the spiritual truths you say in a moving letter to family or a final home movie, but the ones you live, with your actions, day in day out. Those will be the ones that will carry on: your true legacy.

Randy’s minister asked him if he had life insurance, and when he assured him he did, advised him also to get emotional insurance, “the premiums [of which] would be paid for with …time, not …money.” To leave a record to his young children of who he was and how much he loved them; to express his love to his wife while he could — things they could all rely on after he was gone. And now Randy’s family, who are mourning him deeply now, have them, because, in his words, he “put [him]self in a bottle that would one day wash up on the beach for [his] children.” But the bottle wasn’t so much the lecture, as important as that was. The lecture wouldn’t have had much power if it hadn’t been an expression of the way he lived all along. It is his whole life, everything he did and built and all the stories that will be told of him, that is his message to his children, his wife, his students, the people who use the technology he developed, the people who know nothing about him but what they read in this book.

Living one set of values and preaching another is like making a will leaving each of your heirs half a million dollars, while never actually accumulating that much money. For your intentions to come to fruition, you need to be creating the legacy you want to leave now. If you want to leave the next generation a healthy planet, live in a way that this planet can sustain. If you want what you learned to be taught to others, teach it yourself, or endow a school, or both. If you are grateful to an important mentor in your life, be a mentor to someone else.

Here we are in one of the institutions by which human beings shape and pass on their legacy: faith communities. If you want our values of open minds, helping hands, and loving hearts to be the ones that prevail in a world that so often values dogma, greed, and bigotry, then make this a church so strong that it will be guiding this community a hundred years from now. Two hundred years. Five hundred years! Can you even imagine it? Is it too far off? Then remember: it was in the sixteenth century, full five hundred years ago, that early Unitarians and Universalists were lighting beacons in the darkness of religious persecution — sometimes the beacons of their own bodies on the pyre, so brave they were in living their truth, “monarch and creed defying.” ⁴ Each of us came along to this world in the twentieth century, saw the light of their convictions still burning, and followed it here. What light will you leave burning here for someone who will need it many generations hence? They will not know your name, but still, they will sing of you with gratitude.

If that long view is hard to imagine, try a shorter one. The way to know whether you’re happy with your legacy is to ask yourself this: what do you want people to say about you at your funeral? Sometimes we have workshops inviting you to write your own eulogy. The reason is not to be morbid but to help people reflect on this exact question of what they wish to leave behind. In that spirit, let’s each take a few moments right now to imagine the key points. What will people be saying and thinking about you? …. And let’s take a few moments more to reflect: as you listened with the ears of your mind to the things that were said about you, were you proud of what you heard? ….

If there’s a gap between the legacy you are leaving and the one you want to leave, good. It shows you have ideals. And better news: it isn’t too late. You build your legacy with every action you take, every choice you make, every way you earn or spend a dollar, every expression of your time, your talent, your words, your touch.

I invite you to do two things this week. First, reflect on what you want your legacy to be, and tell it to someone who will understand. And second, do one thing to add to that legacy.

You don’t need to give a lecture to a standing-room-only crowd or dictate a best-selling book, you don’t need to be a pioneer in your field, you don’t need your name on a building or in the headlines, you don’t need ten loving grandchildren or even a single child. Just be mindful that everything you do, large and small, is shaping your legacy. Make that shape a lovely and a lasting one.

 

Reflection: Leaving a Legacy

 

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