Recently, after a friend’s teenage son ate a very hot chilli, he remarked “That is something off my bucket list”. His mother, somewhat perplexed, has written to me with some questions. Firstly, should everyone have a bucket list? No, because some people get along fine in life without them. Secondly, is thirteen too young to have a bucket list. No and it is ‘ageist’ to suggest otherwise. Thirdly, what is a ‘bucket list’? The expression ‘bucket list’, popularised by the 2007 film, ‘The Bucket List’, means a list of things to be done or experienced before one dies. Shorter term goals, no matter how important, or long term goals with no personal significance, do not constitute a bucket list.
This raises the question of what do we leave behind once we die and leads on to a related question asked by another friend, namely Do women have less of a ‘legacy’ when they don’t have children?
On the face of it, the answer to this is a straight-forward no. Women who don’t have children can leave a whole range of ‘legacies’ – in business, the sciences, the arts, etc. What you ‘leave behind’ can be any number of things you have produced or created – works of art, scientific research, protecting the environment, etc.
But the real question to be asked here is whether such activities are ‘less’ of a legacy than having a child. The point here seems to be that having a child, in the best of situations, ensures a surviving tradition of the memory of a person. It’s also interesting to note that this question seems more relevant when asked of women rather than men. Do men have less of a legacy when they don’t have children?
But the really pressing question here is what is a ‘legacy’? The word ‘legacy’ is derived from the Latin legatus meaning to depute, delegate, or bequeath. In modern times, the dominant meaning is the legal one of leaving something in a will, although more commonly it can simply mean ‘something left or handed down by a predecessor’ such as in the sentence ‘global warming is the legacy of past environmental neglect’.
In discussing the further meaning of this definition at one of my philosophy meetups, it was argued that a legacy is something consciously left from a parent to a child, particularly in terms of the parent’s image of what the child should be. A successful lawyer who raises a child who is also a successful lawyer can be said to have succeeded in his legacy to that child.
This argument was countered with the claim that whatever legacy a parent leaves for a child is not a ‘body of work’, but is something gained unconsciously from the parent, a way, as it was said, of ‘reading between the lines’, of the parent’s life. It is up to the children to learn from the parents, not to passively receive what the parent has given.
To this it was replied that parents do in fact consciously leave a legacy of what they want their children to be. Consider for example, a child who becomes a drug-taking prostitute. In this case, is this the parent’s legacy to the child? We would typically say no, that is not a legacy that a parent would leave, unless that’s exactly what the parent wanted to child to be. In this case, the legacy of the parent is really a failed legacy.
In response, it can be argued (leaving aside the question of exactly what is wrong with being a drug-taking prostitute), that when a child freely chooses whatever path they pursue, even being a drug-taking prostitute, then the parents legacy has been a success for the child has freely chosen a path in life and that is all a parent can ever hope to bring a child to.
A legacy, from a parent to a child, can only ever be what the child chooses to use of the upbringing they receive. Further, the legacy a childless woman (or man) leaves behind can be just as great as the legacy of children. A legacy is the preservation of what is valuable in a person’s life, but that can happen in various unplanned and unpredictable ways.