Reflections on the Legacy

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Truthfully, I held an iconic view of my grandparents.  I felt that they would never, ever get old and never, ever get sick, and they would ALWAYS be there.  They were my heroes.  I knew that wasn’t true, but man, it made me feel good to think of them that way.

When my granddad got sick recently, it was like a blow to that theory.  How could this happen?  Doesn’t granddad have some special kind of power to just transform back into the guy I know?  The guy that always asks “how am I doing”, even if he asked 2 minutes ago?  The guy that almost always had a smile on his face?  The guy who put five extra “u’s” when he said “stupid”?

Unfortunately, it wasn’t so.  In my tears, I begin to reflect on what my grandad really meant to me.  I thought about his legacy, and what I could use from it.  The definition of legacy is:

anything handed down from the past, as from an ancestor or predecessor”.

I like how the definition says “anything”.  My granddad left me with a thing far more valuable than an inheritance, he left me with a clear example on how to LEAD an entire family, and stick through the good times and bad.  Growing up, I didn’t have an example on how a father was supposed to lead his family – my dad was not there for big portions of my life.  But when we took family trips to the South, I got to see what that’s all about.

My uncles, all seven of them, related to him in a way that I didn’t understand.  They had that bond with their dad, a bond that’s missing in most of our young males this day an age.  They HAD their identity, they were staring at it in the face!  I feel too many of us young men don’t KNOW our identity because we never saw our fathers act in a way that would define us.  I thank God I got to see just some of that when I was visiting my relatives.

My granddad’s legacy will be different for some of us.  I just thank God he left me with something that I can use, bottle it up, and give it away when it’s my turn to walk into glory.

Thanks granddad.

*In Memory of Willie Alexander Lewis, 1929-2010*

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