March 2010 – A Matter Of Legacy: Life And Death
By Alexis Johnson Ph.D
I was startled to read in The New York Times, on Sunday January 10, 2010 that “paradoxically, anxiety about death plays a significant role in the indoctrination of terrorists and suicide bombers – unconscious fear of mortality, of leaving no legacy…” One expert goes on to say “… the overarching motivation of suicide bombers is the quest for personal significance, the desperate longing for a meaningful life that appears only to come with death.”
In my practice as a psychotherapist, I meet people who are concerned with both legacy and meaning but never someone in his twenties and never someone who thought they would find meaning through death. I have met a lot of people in midlife and older who are very concerned with legacy – the legacy of their lives. I find that I am wondering about that as well as I pass through my 6o’s and realize that death is very real, its timing unknown. Someday this ride called life in the body will be over – over personally and over for the important people who surround me.
In thinking about it, I realize that legacy is fueled both by fear and spiritual longing – specifically the desire to contribute. Creating your legacy is a complicated mix of motivations: the desire to leave a mark, to be remembered, to find a kind of immortality, to ward off fear of dying.
To start with the obvious, for most of us there is a biological urge to have kids and those kids are our legacy to the planet. Kids are very intense, tangible and labor intensive and seem to satisfy the existential/spiritual need for legacy for many people. To leave a mark, a trace of ourselves after we are gone pushes some towards art and empire building. Artists, architects and engineers all over the planet create structures of magnificence and beauty that mark the place they inhabit – we can’t think about the desert in Egypt without thinking about the pyramids – and that marks us, the beholders as well. To enter a soaring Gothic church, to see a painting that engages us is to change us; to walk the Roman roads in Italy or anywhere else is to inspire us as to what we can do, can create. The makers of many of these ‘marks’ are unknown – lost to time like the carvers of the great Buddhas, or part of a team where one person’s name gets credit but the builders, the actual hands on makers are no longer known. Think about something really big like the Hoover dam. Yes, it was someone’s dream. Yes, there were known engineers. But many many men made that project possible, invented tools and techniques along the way that brought something mammoth into existence that had been a dream in one man’s mind. They left their mark, but we no longer known who they were, or what they contributed.
The need to be remembered is slightly different. Many artists sign their work in a prominent fashion: I did this and you the viewer must know me as a creator. It is hard to go anywhere in the world and not find a carving, a graffiti, that John Was Here, John got here before you did, John even got here first. Who did get to the top of Everest first? Or the North Pole? The urge to be first is the urge to be remembered. To be first is to be extraordinary, and to be extraordinary heightens our chance of being remembered – of beating personal death.
In addition to tangible legacies there are intangible ones that are perhaps even more powerful. All of us affect each other in a myriad of ways, both positive and negative and this residue of interaction is a powerful legacy. We now know that the residue of interaction between mother and child literally forms the neocortex of the child, creating his Love Map, his way of creating safety, connections and personal integrity. And these neural pathways continue to develop throughout life.
However, as I said earlier, I think of the need to leave a legacy is more complicated than just fear of death. I am not underestimating that fear – like Becker who wrote The Denial of Death (1974) I think that fear is a big motivation and operates both consciously and unconsciously. But I think of that as the ‘stick’, the fear that can push us. There is also a ‘carrot’ a longing that can pull us and that is the longing to contribute to the whole, to make a difference, to expand knowledge or beauty,
Two of the great teachers for our planet Jesus and Buddha did not leave an explicit written legacy. They both relied on the intangible side of life: that their message would affect people and those people would pass on the change. It took at least one generation for Jesus’s words to be put into written form and many more generations for Buddha’s. All education is passing on a legacy of the culture – we use words and pictures to educate, but education itself is an intangible process – information and beliefs move from the teacher’s mind to the students. Within the student’s mind it is absorbed, changed and hopefully something new, something creative will emerge, changing the student, possibly the teacher, and even rippling out further as the student creates his life.
I work with an older man who has prostate cancer and some issues with his heart. At 71, he has led a very isolated life. Because of mental health issues, he has never been able to keep a job (though he is well educated and very intelligent), has never married and has no children. He feels these losses keenly and doesn’t understand why most of the world gets to have these ‘ordinary pleasures’ that have been denied him. When he turned 65 he started talking about legacy and his grief that he would die without leaving a legacy to anyone. He notes that he had a few rare books that he would leave to a university, but how unsatisfying that was to his sense of wanting to pass on something of himself. Over the following months, we explored what would he like to leave as a creation he could gift to others and slowly he came to the idea of a space where people could come together spontaneously and create music. He made an arrangement with one of the not-for-profit groups in Manhattan to use a small space one Sunday evening a month and put up signs all over town inviting musicians to come to play. Over the past 5 years, this has been his cause, his pleasure and his intense frustration. His interpersonal skills are such that he assumes everyone wants what he wants and he is devastated when people don’t follow through, don’t show up, and don’t leave space for each player to participate musically. He gets into intense disagreement with people, they don’t appreciate him and often they leave the circle. But slowly and painfully the project unfolds. Some people have become regulars and he has people to talk to about music and even other topics for the first time in his life.
This act of creation is truly a ‘spontaneous gesture’ (Winnicott)on his part; he is creating a life, his life in the most meaningful way. It has come from deep within and was totally unpredictable based on his history, family or education. He still fears that when he dies, the group will dissolve, and of course perhaps it will. But it also seems to have a life of its own; people come, some stay, some never return. It is a kaleidoscope of nationalities, instruments, religions and whether or not it dies with him, it is truly his creation and had nourished and taught him and others in surprising ways.
As a direct outgrowth of this experience with a collective, he has found compassion for his mother. He has always hated her intensely, blaming her for his lack of emotional connection to himself and his failure to connect with others. He has a policy of never accepting her phone calls and will only respond to emails if she asks him a direct question that he needs to answer – usually about getting together once a year with his brothers for her birthday. For the first time he has noticed that she is frail and vulnerable (at 96!) and is calling her doctors to see what additional help she might need. He talks with me about what he can do for her to make her life as comfortable as possible. Also, for the first time, he called her directly to ask how she was doing rather than get information indirectly from a brother.
All the young people being trained for sacrifice, to give the ultimate sacrifice of their lives as terrorists, as suicide bombers, live within a collective devoted to a cause, usually the cause of hatred. The groupthink of their collective is not at all interested in making a spontaneous gesture, in creating a meaningful life. The groupthink of their collective has determined that life is not meaningful due to their circumstances, the injustices they have suffered; so death is the answer. That is where meaning and legacy lie.
I know I cannot affect that way of thinking directly. But I can ask myself and each of us to think about injustice and what actions we can take. We can choose to live in ‘virtual’ collectives that support self-reflection, kindness and the space for the individual’s spontaneous gesture. We can notice when we hate and when we fear and wonder what fuels that part of us in that very moment. Who knows where those thoughts will ripple to?
In our cultural collective, the New Year is a time to make a resolution and most of us make resolutions that are too big and too hard to follow through on. Most of us can’t make drastic changes in life style. We need to practice, practice, practice in small manageable steps. Think little, think do-able. But maybe also think about legacy – our personal legacy to the world. The light is returning and in spite of the intense cold, the slant of the sun, the longer minutes of daylight lift my spirits ever so slightly. What do I want to pass on from my time here? And what do you? What tangible gifts and what intangible gifts lie within each of us waiting to emerge? Maybe while the dark still comes with late afternoon, spend a few moments in the cusp of twilight and just ask yourself the question and wait to see what happens……..
