| New year time to consider what will be leave behind |
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By: By JEANNE BRAGG
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Jeanne Bragg
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Like everyone else, I’ve been too busy to watch a television show from start to finish (are you surprised, Ted?), but each Dec. 31st I set my VCR to record the nightly news (in my case, NBC) when they show the year in review.
It must have been shown earlier last week, because the only wrap up NBC news had was on New Years Eve was an “In Memoriam” of people who had passed this year.
Earlier this year the Today Show had an overview of their year together, and it was delightful. I found it again on line at msnbc.mjsn.com by entering the search words, “Today Show Video. ” It was there with some other interesting stuff.
Among those who left this world in 2007 were Lady Bird (Johnson), Tammy Faye
(Baker Messner) and Anna Nicole (Smith), three relatively small people who became larger than life enough to be recognized by their first names.
When they memorialized Luciano Pavarotti, I thought, ”We are lucky. We can still hear his special voice on recordings,” and that led me to think. “What are we, ourselves, leaving to this world when we pass?”
Very few things of note come to mind.
Because of my friend, Mike Pirtle, my children will have a few written comments to read one day. I made a cookbook once and gave it as gifts. Will that count? I don’t know that there are many home movies of me to show the great grandchildren. For most of us, memories will be our only legacy.
Could that be why the scrap-booking hobby has become such a phenomenon?
Because parents are trying to preserve moments and pass those down to future generations? Maybe so.
As my mother lay dying she asked me to find an old Band-Aid box in one of her drawers that had eight silver dollars in it _ one for each of her children _ and asked me to distribute them. She must have been thinking of this as her days were numbered, too.
Very few of us have the gifts of Pavarotti and I prefer not to have the legacy of
Anna Nicole and Tammy Faye. But what I’m leaving behind is definitely something I’ll be thinking about in the coming year.
There was also a very moving photograph and story on the Today Show website.
Click on “Photo of the Year” and see the photograph of Mary McHugh at her boyfriend’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day. It’s hard to read the photographer’s blog with a dry eye.
The photographer, John Moore, tells the story of Mary and her fiancé, James
Regan, who graduated from Duke. Jimmy could have gone to Officer Candidate School, Wall Street or law school but chose to serve his country on the front lines by enlisting as an Army Ranger. He was deployed four times in the past three years and killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in February.
Mary said, “We loved each other so much and ... we thought we had all the time in the world.” Like countless others in this war and in wars gone by, Jimmy’s life was sacrificed for our freedom.
Jimmy won’t have grandchildren to look at his scrapbook. Unlike Pavarotti, whose voice will be left to the world forever, he’ll be recorded in history in other ways ... as a man of honor who chose service over self; as a man whose story was read by thousands, as a tombstone at Arlington Cemetery.
No one will ever doubt there’s a legacy left behind by Jimmy Regan or his fellow soldiers. We all enjoy the luxuries of those sacrifices every hour of every day.
Mary and the rest of Jimmy’s family are left to deal with the pain and hurt, and no doubt pride. And we are blessed with our freedom that we should never take for granted on any single day.
‘Til next week. |
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